Mariposa botnet hits HTC Magic

Vodafone has said that the discovery of an infection on an HTC Magic device was an isolated incident and it has had no further reports of security problems with the smartphone.

Earlier this week, a Panda Security employee discovered that her HTC Magic phone had an infection on it, after her Panda Cloud Antivirus flagged up malicious autorun.inf and autorun.exe files.

Panda then discovered that the malware was a Mariposa bot client. The IT security company was recently involved in uncovering the criminals accused of running the Mariposa botnet, which is thought to have infected around 13 million PCs with a virus, stealing credit card details and other information.

The firm also said it found the Conficker worm and Lineage password-stealing malware on the phone.

In response, Vodafone told IT PRO: "The device involved in this incident was purchased by a customer of Vodafone Spain and is currently being investigated."

"It seems from the investigation so far that it was an isolated, local incident. Vodafone UK has received no reported security problems from customers using HTC Magic, although we are obviously going to continue to monitor the situation very closely."