In a recent scenario, Vodafone was held responsible for supplying a Mariposa botnet malware and other threats on HTC Magic Android Smartphones. It was noticed that a smartphone supplied by Vodafone’s Spanish division was attempting to make a backdoor entry into the systems during the synchronization process to steal critical information.

The news became widespread as the customer affected is an employee of Spanish anti-virus firm Panda Security. The extra code had been devised to generate information from systems not concerned with the recent detaining of three suspected botmasters in Spain. However, Vodafone acknowledged the problem and claimed it to be a totally isolated incident.

Pedro Bustamante, the researcher at Panda Security who analyzed the attack confirmed the malware to be a Mariposa bot client. The botnet-control mechanism revealed that this malware belongs to a guy named ‘tnls’. Once it infects the systems, the malware sends a connection request back home to receive further orders perhaps to steal all data pertaining to user’s credentials.

The smartphone was also found to be infected by Confiker and a Lineage password-stealing code as per analysts at Panda. Vodafone stated that security and privacy of its customers are one of its top concerns. Following the incident they lunched an immediate investigation to find the root cause and concluded that this was an isolated local incident. These problems usually are a result of an infected computer in the manufacturing or production lines of the company.

[via Ubergizmo]