In an unprecedented event, the Cupertino giant, Apple (APPL) for the first time confessed that its App Store which hosts useful applications for both, desktop and mobile platforms was hacked following reports from various cyber security firms.
Malicious Code in Apple Store Products
How the malware worked its way into several apps? Simple, Apple developers visit different websites to download their popular development software called Xcode development.
Hackers managed to get Apple’s developers download this popular Xcode development platform without an aorta of doubt that they were indeed downloading and working with a tainted version of Xcode called XcodeGhost.
This way, XcodeGhost managed to get the hacker’s job done via the developers who unknowingly released the tainted version of the apps with malicious code in the App Store.
As such, this setting had the ripple effect and many such malicious apps were downloaded by many users from trusted developers.
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Upon learning this, Apple soon jumped into the act of cleaning the App Store. We’ve removed the apps from the App Store that we know have been created with this counterfeit software, Apple spokeswoman Christine Monaghan said in an email.
He further said, “We are working with the developers to make sure they’re using the proper version of Xcode to rebuild their apps.”
Meanwhile, Apple cautioned developers and advised them to use the right version of Xcode so that future attacks can be prevented. The investigation conducted found the malware had limited functionality and therefore, the firm uncovered no examples of data theft as a result of the attack.
An America based cyber-security firm Palo Alto Networks Inc. was the first to report the issue few weeks ago whose cognizance was taken only recently.
