/ Virus | droidstone.com

19 March 2010 ~ Comments Off

3,000 tainted microSD cards to be replaced by Vodafone Spain

News Feed

htc magic

Last week Vodafone Spain announced it had determined the microSD card to be the cause of some crazy activity on their HTC Magic. When this had first surfaced, Vodafone Spain said that it was an isolated incident and only affected the one device in the UK. (And we might have even scoffed a bit at Panda Security possibly crying wolf.)

But over a rather short period of time we have seen that number jump from 1 card to 3,000 cards now. While they have admitted that they are replacing these due to infection, and not just as a precaution, other details around this have been kept rather secret. Is it really just 3,000 cards, or will we be posting an update next week that it has grown to over 10,000? [Engadet via Movil Zona]

 

Continue Reading

Tags: , , , , , ,

10 March 2010 ~ Comments Off

Memory card, not Vodafone Magic itself, responsible for Android botnet strike

News Feed

Vodafone Magic

Stories have been going around that a botnet was being spread by the HTC Magic on Vodafone. Specifically, it was Panda Security that sounded the alarm after they plugged in said Android phone and had all kinds of alarms go off. However, it turns out it was an infected memory card that was the culprit, and not a bad batch of phones, as original post author Pedro Bustamante later points out in the comments.

It’s the memory card for sure, not the actual Android filesystem. It could be a malicious employee, a bad batch, provided by the manufacturer, lack of QA or a returned and refurbished unit. But as you said, either way Vodafone needs to better QA these before shipping out to customers.

Pedro’s right, there should be better Q&A to keep this from happening. But there also should be a little more discretion used before we see headlines such as "Vodafone distributes Mariposa botnet." (And the post itself hasn’t been updated?) An infected memory card is bad, but one bad apple does not an outbreak make. The sky’s not falling, folks.

Continue Reading

Tags: , , , , , , , ,