Samsung Wave smartphone ships with malware

Some Samsung Wave smartphones are shipping with malware

A number of Samsung Wave smartphones have shipped with malware stored on the handset's microSD card.

Several security firms have confirmed that a file on the S8500 smartphone's 1GB microSD card is a Trojan.

Samsung has confirmed that a small number of the handsets destined for the German market received the infected cards, but that the problem has now been rectified.

When the handset is synchronised to a computer that has autorun enabled, the malware will download the software to the PC where it acts as a standard Trojan.

"We detect it as Trojan.Generic.3932466," wrote Sean Sullivan, a security advisor at anti-virus vendor F-Secure, in a blog post. "We have telemetry indicating that this is in the wild (but quite limited)."

A Samsung spokesperson confirmed that the securtiy incident was "an isolated issue that took place solely in the German market".

"As soon as the problem was identified the issue was immediately resolved. All products currently available on the market have been tested and are perfectly safe to use," the spokesperson added.

This is not the first time Samsung has had problems with embedded malware. The company had similar problems less than two years ago when shipments of an electronic picture frame were found to contain malware.

Other manufacturers are also having increasing problems with malware inserted in the production stage. Such devices are usually set up to receive software from a central server, and a single infection of that code can be spread to a host of devices with no further effort.

"The lesson is simple. Scan everything that you plug into your computer for malware, even if it has been freshly bought from a reputable vendor," Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, wrote in his blog.