In what can be termed as the first breach of apple’s defense, several apps on the Apple App Store were found infected from a malware dubbed as XcodeGhost. Apple on Sunday started the cleansing process with the removal of apps, which were infected from XcodeGhost malware.
Apple finally acknowledged the concerns raised by several cyber security firms by accepting the presence of XcodeGhost in hundreds of legitimate iPhone and iPad apps.
Over the years, Apple has followed a stringent app review process. Only after successful completion of the review, Apple allows apps to be listed in its App Store. As per Palo Alto Networks Inc. – a cyber-security firm, prior to this incident, only five apps had ever been reported as malicious on Apple App Store.
As per hacking experts, the infected apps can collect anonymous data from user’s apple device, pop-up face alerts to use it for slip passwords through Apple’s icloud service. Also, it could read and write data on the clipboard section.
Apple representative Christine Monaghan in an official emailed statement said, “We’ve removed the apps from the App Store that we know have been created with this counterfeit software. We are working with the developers to make sure they’re using the proper version of Xcode to rebuild their apps.”
