Vodafone HTC

 Vodafone HTC
Vodafone report their exclusive HTC Magic phone as âSleek, stylish & exclusive to Vodafone, the Magic is powered by leading edge know-how. So web necessities like Google Maps⢠& Google Search⢠work brilliantly. You can generate shortcuts to your favourite sites & download fun games, news feeds & widgets. Then pick where everything goes - so you can get to it all basically.â

Vodafone HTC (not so) Magic Android Smartphoneâs


Now it also seems that our friendly hackers can get to it all so basically as well. It's been reported that Panda Security has found that the HTC Magic comes infected by malware.

This was discovered by a staff member of Panda Security who had received her brand spanking new HTC Magic phone. He found that when he connected the phone to her PC by the usb hub her anti-virus alerted her to suspicious infections, detecting both an autorun.inf & autorun.exe as malicious. These turned out to be the Mariposa botnet, which loaded itself automatically to the PC when the phone was connected, the Conficker worm, & malware with a password stealer for Lineage. After checking it was found that all infections were contained on the SD card in the phone.

Vodafone wrote:

At the moment this is being inquired in to by Vodaphone, & so far there has only been this isolated case (in Germany), & in a statement from Vodafone

Following extensive Quality Assurance testing on HTC Magic handsets in several of our operating companies, early indications are that this was an isolated local incident

âVodafone takes the security & privacy of its customers seriously & launched an immediate inquiry in to this incident

Vodafone keeps its security processes under constant review as new threats arise & they will take all appropriate actions to safeguard our customersâ  privacy.


As a precaution it might be wise when receiving a brand spanking new phone with a SD card or any other type of transportable memory storage to scan it with an up to date antivirus program, before using it in either phone or PC.

Even if this does turn out to be an isolated case it might plant the seed of an idea in to the mind of cyber criminals to over out something similar to this or the chip & pin machines that had malware built in to them at factoryâs in Pakistan in 2008