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Vodafone Spain supplies pre-Mariposa'd smartphone (again)

Vodafone Spain has again supplied a HTC Magic smartphone that came pre-infected with the Mariposa botnet client and other malware crud. The second incident, involving an Android-based phone supplied to a researcher at S21Sec, comes a week after the mobile phone giant supplied the same type of infection on the identical model of …

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dave 93
Coat

Couldn't happen on an iPhone

Apples tight control and vetting of apps does have it's upside ;-)

Mines the one with the 'contact with the devil' in the pocket.

Maliciously Crafted Packet

Bad news for Android

This is great eh? We have an open platform. You can load what apps you like from wherever you like. But now look what happens.

If Android has these problems now whats it going to be like when it overtake's the iPhones market share? Moot point. If it carries on like this it wont.

This is not a re run of the Mac vs PC war of the early 90's, which was a time when joe public didn't even understand what a computer was.

Your dealing with more savvy users now who ain't going to put up with shit like viruses and malware on their phone. Especially after having experienced the nice safe iPhone iTunes ecosystem.

These issues need to be addressed, but I can see how this can be done without the app store model and lock-in Apple and now Microsoft have adopted?

Dan 55
Megaphone

Vodafone Spain

Knowing Vodafone Spain, I'm surprised they haven't tried to charge for it too.

Remy Redert
Stop

re: Couldn't happen on an iPhone

So you can't store data on an iPhone and then address it as you would any USB based storage media?

This is not an Android problem, this is a 'the morons loading these phones have been infected with malware' problem and could occur to any vendor, with any phone that has storage which can easily accessed by a computer.

bygjohn
Reply Icon

In a nutshell...

... No!

Unlike the older hard drive iPods (and maybe others, I'm not sure), the iPhone and iPod Touch don't have a "disk mode" so they don't act like Mass Storage devices when connected up to a computer.

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