Viruses and malicious apps hit the Apple app store
If there is something that distinguishes the store from applications from Appleof other repositories or content stores is the restrictive part of their admission system And the fact is that the company wants to ensure the quality of everything they distribute to their users, avoiding everything from apps that don't work, have poor design or are a scam, to viruses and tools they seek to collect user informationSomething, the latter, in which have failed And that is that a good amount of malicious applicationshave managed to sneak into the App Store Of course, at the moment it seems to be a problem focused on China
It seems that the problem resides in the tool Xcode, specially designed for developing applications in iOS e OS X A utility that Apple distributes freethrough its website, offering its developers the necessary resources to create applications and content for their mobile devices and computers. However, it is also distributed via developer forums and other websites in an unofficial and secure way It is in these unofficial versions of Xcode where several lines of code capable of infecting applications created with the tool have been discovered.Something they called XcodeGhost Thus, not even the developers of the malicious apps found in App Storehave been knowingly or have acted voluntarily to deploy viruses to these tools.
Thanks to these secretly included lines of code, applications created with XcodeGhost are able to collect a a good handful of information from the terminals of the users that have downloaded them. Of course, data about the name of the terminal, the time, the type of connection to the Internet that it uses”¦ information that does not seem too important nor can it be used, a priori, to blackmail the user or compromising their security or privacy Something that will have made more than one user in China breathe easy.
And this security breach is important in itself, rather than for the repercussions it may have caused, since it is a low blow to what seemed like an infallible quality system ofApple A formula that ensured that applications distributed through App Store are secure, so quality and reliable. However, more than twenty applications in China have been created with XcodeGhost And it What's worse, many of them accumulate thousands of downloads and good reviews by carrying out the job efficiently. Thus, they look like safe applications, from trusted developers (who probably didn't know the danger they were creating), so users don't have to reference data to avoid these hazards
While Apple works on how to prevent further malicious apps from being distributed through its official app store, it is advisable to avoid downloading content from Chinese developers, always look through comments for any report from a user who has already confirmed whether it is an application that can be trusted or not .
