[threat-intel] Vodafone distributes Mariposa botnet (by Panda)

http://research.pandasecurity.com/vodafone-distributes-mariposa/

Here is yet another example of a company distributing malware to its userbase. Unfortunately it probably won't be the last.

Today one of our colleagues received a brand new Vodafone HTC Magic with Google's Android OS. "Neat" she said. Vodafone distributes this phone to its userbase in some European countries and it seems affordable as you can get it for 0€ or 1€ under certain conditions.

The interesting thing is that when she plugged the phone to her PC via USB her Panda Cloud Antivirus went off, detecting both an autorun.inf and autorun.exe as malicious. A quick look into the phone quickly revealed it was infected and spreading the infection to any and all PCs that the phone would be plugged into.

A quick analysis of the malware reveals that it is in fact a Mariposa bot client. This one, unlike the one announced last week which was run by spanish hacker group "DDP Team", is run by some guy named "tnls" as the botnet-control mechanism shows:

00129953 . 81F2 736C6E74 XOR EDX,746E6C73 ; "tnls"

The Command & Control servers which it connects to via UDP to receive instructions are:

mx5.nadnadzz2.info
mx5.channeltrb123trb.com
mx5.ka3ek2.com

Once infected you can see the malware "phoning home" to receive further instructions, probably to steal all of the user's credentials and send them to the malware writer.

Interestingly enough, the Mariposa bot is not the only malware I found on the Vodafone HTC Magic phone. There's also a Confiker and a Lineage password stealing malware. I wonder who's doing QA at Vodafone and HTC these