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What You Need to Know About iOS Malware XcodeGhost

kbmb said:
According to a comment on that post.....the Angry Birds 2 is not the US version. Sure would be nice if Apple would get ahead of this instead of the panic created by the media.

-Kevin
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How hard would it be for Apple to publish an official list of apps impacted.
 
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Camscaner Pro and CamCard I use...not sure if it is impacted or not, but I do have lots of important documents in it! Really shame I had to delete the app without knowing if it is impacted really or not. Better Apple to release a tool to scan all apps and remove the affected one by only retaining the data alone, if possible!
 
C DM said:
While certainly true about testing every possibility, it seems like there was a way to do it with this one given that they have been able to somehow find and disable the affected apps.
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Because they already know what they're looking for. A random search, for whatever, is massively harder.

A bit like scanning for a virus, once you've ID'd how it looks instead of trying to detect it by what it might do amongst millions of lines of code.
 
chucker23n1 said:
I replied to a "how hard is it?" post with "how hard is it?", since I found it a bit ironic that the original poster either didn't read the article in full (which, frankly, isn't that long), or disregarded it. Now I'm the rude one? OK.
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Yeah, you are. Do you really talk like that in person to person interactions? It's not nice and unnecessary.
 
dejo said:
Mod Note: This thread was closed to clean up off-topic, PRSI talk. If you wish to continue discussing such matters, please do so in our Politics, Religion and Social Issues forum, assuming you qualify.
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I understand why some of the comments got deleted, as they were indeed veering into PRSI. But others were simply a discussion of the possible origin of this malware. No one cares to know why Tencent, the developer of WeChat, with hundreds of millions of users, downloaded an unofficial version of Xcode and introduced malware into the app store? Now given the opaque regulatory and legal situation in China it is indeed a valid question to ask whether we can trust apps made by these large Chinese companies. And Apple should be more transparent about their relationship with these companies.
 
rockinrony said:
Apple maps fiasco,
iphone 5 battery problem recall,
iphone 5c failure,
ios 7.1 icons re-color,
shift key confusion,
Apple watch failure,
Macbook pro display recall,
iphone 6+ camera recall,
now XCODE Ghost

Apple is surely not "reliable Apple" anymore. Its just about market share and make money

Very sad to see new Apple :(
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Do you actually know what the hell you're talking about? No.
 
So what do I need to do here? The only app I have from this list is WinZip as I have received ZIP files in the past.

  1. Are there any alternative to WinZip?
  2. What kind of stuff is at risk? Anything and everything I ever entered into Safari?
 
I can understand some developers would download the xcode from 3rd party servers in China instead of Apple app store. connecting from china to the outside the world IS indeed very slow. I have two questions to Apple upper mgmt and TCook.

1) Knowing China is the focus of iOS growth, and knowing the driving force of the iOS growth is its eco system, and Apple has such a 'good' (compare to google) relationship with Chinese gov, WHY on earth didn't you beef up the data center in China (or build one if there isn't one yet) so developers in China didn't have to look for a 3rd party server to download the software (which is GBs in size).
2) If for some reasons there is noway to beef up the data center in China, why can you release the official MD5/SHA signatures? (maybe there is one? correct me if I am wrong).

Fail to do so only shows TC and his team does NOT have the same vision and sense as SJ did. disappointing....

and then for apps like WeChat is infected, only shows how casual those tech companies in China are managed.
 
steve23094 said:
There is something not quite right about this list from Fox-IT. I checked six random apps on the list and every one is still available in the App Store and has not been recently updated.

Now that Apple has made a statement that they have removed the offending apps this means either:-

a) Fox-IT's list is wrong.
b) Apple is lying that they have removed the rogue apps (or maybe the Marketing Dept got ahead of themselves).
c) Apple has missed some of them, but somebody at Apple must have seen this list too.
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Yea, I hope it's A. Hopefully we'll hear something from the Mercury devs really soon.

I've been using it for years... but fortunately, don't recall getting such a dialog while using it. If such dialogs can pop-up while it's not in use, I suppose I could be in trouble. The good news is that it would only be my Apple ID/iCloud password, which I could easily change (and maybe should just to be safe).
 
If someone can change the Xcode and pass thru the apple app store check, how much will you still trust the app store? and this xcodeghost had been around for over 6 months and apple didn't even know.....

Wake up, Tim Cook and Apple!
 
jmantn said:
Seriously what developer who knows anything about security is going to download an IDE from a non official source?

That's like downloading an OS from The Pirate Bay and being shocked the file was injected with malicious code.
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Exactly. It isn't like Apple charges for access to Xcode. Why the hell would you seek "alternate distribution methods" for something available for free, on the open web, from a verified source?

I'd like a list of all developers and publishing houses involved, not just the apps they produced. They will not be getting my business in the future. The mind boggles at how inept they must be to make such a basic security mistake!
 
dxmac99 said:
If someone can change the Xcode and pass thru the apple app store check, how much will you still trust the app store? and this xcodeghost had been around for over 6 months and apple didn't even know.....
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That's primarily because the affected apps didn't do anything particularly critical that could be easily detected during the screening process. It was always possible to smuggle bad code into the app store. There is no practical way completely prevent this, since Apple cannot spend weeks analyzing the code of every single app. They *can* detect things like unauthorized use of private APIs or abuse of access entitlements, and do certain types of static analysis, so the screening process is not useless even though it's not 100% watertight.
 
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