What You Need to Know About iOS Malware XcodeGhost

APPLE’S APP STORE GOT INFECTED WITH THE SAME TYPE OF MALWARE THE CIA DEVELOPED (sorry for all caps, from the article header)

 

Not really.

Not to defend them, but I've seen user posts on sites like Ars Technica from folks who know the internet landscape in China having lived there. Folks on this thread keep saying they couldn't wait a few minutes or few extra hours to get the real deal?

Well, the internet connections leaving the country can get slowed down to a crawl. We're talking 36K modem speeds. That can take weeks or months to DL Xcode directly from Apple. At times, you simply can't get anything. And the connection isn't uniform either. Somebody can say "I was in such and such province and managed to DL stuff just fine", but other areas can have an "internet connection draught", so while you DL-ed just fine and we believe you, others can legitimately have issues DL-ing stuff.

 

Umm, it seems relying the list here is bad advice - as is the advice "How do I protect myself against XcodeGhost?
iOS users should immediately uninstall any infected iOS app listed here on their devices"

https://www.fireeye.com/blog/executive-perspective/2015/09/protecting_our_custo.html says that there are over 4000 infected apps, and this list is of only 100 or so apps. Seems like reliable info. Seems that a manual check is therefore practically impossible.

Where I have noticed an oddly frequent prompting for my Apple ID credentials, and so I've gone through and culled the apps on my iDevices, and updated most of the rest. Doesn't seem like a robust fix, but I don't see a reasonable alternative, other than accepting my iDevices are swiss cheese.