Apple pulls out infected apps from the App Store
After a major attack on Apple's iTune App Store, the company had removed almost 40 popular apps that were infected by a malware.
The malicious software, or malware, is capable of copying customer's information, including their iCloud passwords, and allowing the phone to open dangerous websites.
It was first discovered over the weekend, after Palo Alto Networks' security researchers found out that there are 39 apps that were infected by the malware. Among these iPhone and iPad apps was WeChat, which is a popular Chinese messaging app that is used by over 600 million people around the world.
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It was discovered that these affected apps were all developed in China. These apps use a modified version of the software development kit of Apple, which is known as the Xcode. Xcode provides the tools that developers use to create iOS apps, and hackers were able to manipulate it.
Apple released a statement about the hacking, and CNN reported that infected apps were already removed from the App Store. "We are working with the developers to make sure they're using the proper version of Xcode to rebuild their apps."
Anyone can have access to Xcode since it is available for free on the Apple website, but what the hackers did was to get the Chinese developers to download the Xcode from their servers instead of the one on Apple's page.
No official statement was released yet on why the developers chose to download the Xcode from the hackers instead of Apple's, but it seems that the hackers offered a faster way to get the Xcode software through them. In China, it will take a while to download items from Apple, so most Chinese often try to get tools and apps from alternate servers or websites.
Apple believes that there were no data stolen by the hackers from their customers, but is still investigating the issue further.
