Some of the well-known Chinese apps on Apple's App Store got infected by a malicious software.
The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the malware which hit the App Store was described as a first-of-its-kind security breach that exposed a rare susceptibility in Apple's mobile platform. It said that Chinese applications got infected after software developers were decoyed into using an unauthorized and compromised version of Apple's developer tool kit.
According to EJ Insight, the malware outbreak has affected about more than three dozens of applications. Some of these were Tencent's mobile chat app WeChat, car-hailing app Didi Kuaidi, and a Spotify-like music app from NetEase Inc.
The Free Republic further discussed that infected apps can convey information about the user's device and may prompt fake alerts which could be a channel to snip passwords to Apple's iCloud service. These could also read and write information on the user's clipboard.
The said attack was very rare that it affected only applications in the Apple's App Store in China. This was caused by convincing some Chinese developers to download Apple XTools coming from an untrusted third-party source and not from Apple. These XTools had been added extra lines of code as compared to the tools used to build apps.
Apple Inc. is aware of this problem and have made some precautions to resolve this issue. Apple said in a statement last Sunday, "To protect our customers, we've removed the apps from the App Store that we know have been created with this counterfeit software and we are working with the developers to make sure they're using the proper version of Xcode to rebuild their apps".
The Chinese applications that have been infected by the malicious software were removed from the App Store and will be restructured with the appropriate version of the Xcode made by Apple.
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