HTC Magic sent out by Vodafone contained viruses

A Vodafone HTC Magic might have ended up the unknowing distributor of infections such as the Conficker worm and other viruses, according to a post on Panda Security's blog.

According to the report over at the Panda Research blog, an employee received a brand new Magic in the post and excitedly plugged it straight into her PC at the Panda labs only to be met with security alerts warning of malware detections.

The infections were designed to spread to any PC that the phone was plugged into and included instances of the Mariposa bot, the Conficker worm and “lineage password stealing” malware.

Contrary to early reports on the incident, Pedro Bustamente of Panda, says that the most likely explanation is an oversight in Vodafone's QA department, rather than malicious code being present on other new handsets.

“It’s the memory card for sure, not the actual Android file system. It could be a malicious employee, a bad batch, provided by the manufacturer, lack of QA or a returned and refurbished unit.”

So there we have it folks, if you own an HTC Magic there doesn't seem to be much reason to think that this is a widespread problem, whether or not that sufficiently satisfies customers is a different question.