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More Trouble In Apple's App Store
quickOnTheUptake writes in to update the story of foul play in Apple's App Store, which we talked over on Sunday. The Next Web, which broke the story, now provides evidence of rampant App Farms used for theft in the store. Here is a summary of the problems TNW has seen, which includes large-scale break-ins of the App Store accounts of users worldwide. Apple has responded to the initial reports, has disabled the account of the initially fingered rogue developer, and has called on those whose accounts were misused to change their password and credit card. Both TNW and Engadget, at least, believe the problems go far deeper than Apple is admitting.
Serves that arrogant company right.
Next thing you know a plague of viruses will affect their silly phones.
So a total of 48 apps out of 200,000+ were bad 'Apples', and suddenly the entire App store is a 'dismal failure' I think someone above put it. Unlike the 'banking app' in the droid market that just took bank account usernames and passwords? Does that make the entire Android Market a failure? Not at all. I think the claim here is that Apple failed in it's drive to protect users where I see at least an effort to protect, rather than a free for all that you get with the Android Market. These weren't bad Apps in the same sense as the banking fraud app in the Android Market. They were just crap apps that the designer purchased (which he also happened to write), as part of his scam. They were for crap anime books of questionable content and copyright.
It doesn't matter if these apps 'DO' anything as far as this scam goes. They were book apps. This person or persons would hack into someone's iTunes account, and then he would turn around and purchase his own app. This had the net effect of moving it up in the rankings, and netted him some cash as well via the purchase. Apparently this is a common practice in China where you go into a certain channel, purchase someone's account, and you typically have 24 hours give or take before either Apple, or your credit card company cuts the person off (Yes, Apple will flag your account for suspicious activity as well).
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2446
This is no different than someone stealing someone's credit card number, or hacking ANY online account where you store card information.
I saw someone yesterday complaining that they had to call their credit card company to get the charges reversed, discounting the fact that your credit card company is the proper place to stop credit card fraud. The App store is a vendor, and they will be more than happy to sell you whatever you want to buy, just as it happens in the Droid Market, Amazon, etc.
My bank, however, will stop charges before they get out of control, flag the account, and call me for suspicious activity. I would imagine most banks have similar fraud departments. In addition, identity theft typically limits your responsibility and getting a charge reversed is as simple as calling your bank.
Lastly, preventing this is as simple as setting the Payment Option in iTunes to 'None', and/or using a proper password rather than '12345' or some other easily guess-able password. It always amuses me that people are so quick to store credit card information online and then feign surprise when someone hacks their account with a common dictionary password.