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Malware Strikes Apple iOS App Store Again
tlhIngan writes "Well, it's happened again. Malware has slipped past Apple again and appeared in the iOS App Store. This time though, an iOS application came bundled with two Windows executables containing relatively old malware. It will not infect an iOS device nor Macs, but might affect Windows iTunes users. Looks like Apple needs to update their Windows malware scanner for iOS app submissions now."
This just seems like a lot of work to infect a windows PC. Especially considering the relatively good track record Apple has at preventing malware from appearing on their platform. I almost half wonder if this is more of a proof-of-concept for a bored hacker.
"Dr." Jobs?!
It's not clear how this even an infection vector for windows computers. How does the payload get executed on a windows machine?
It's fairly clear that the dev somehow got malware files packed up in their iphone app package by accident, possibly because of an infected machine somewhere in the workflow. (Like developing content/art/etc on a windows computer)
Judging by the app name alone, it's probably psudo-spam useless shovelware developed by outsourced programmers. The sort of place where I'd expect to see low quality development/qa that would lead to this.
But really, can you fault apple for not catching windows malware on a non-x86, non-windows platform? Why would that even be on their radar?
The only way it might affect them is If they decide that they want to unpackage the app's .ipa package file, extract the two virus files, and then execute them, which only iOS developers and malware researchers might have a valid reason for actually doing. As they're currently packaged, however, they're entirely inert. They weren't even being flagged by Sophos and some of the other AV software out there because of how they were packaged and the fact that there was no way for them to execute.
This is a case of two inert files being accidentally bundled in an app package, which is a bit of a non-story, aside from the humorous aspect of it.
You must extract an IAP file for no reason at all, locate two windows binaries, and execute them... hmm.. sounds like a non-story to me.
I have both Lowbandwidth and Simple Design checked but it's still feeding me a complicated front page.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Netscape will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even BBEdit Lite is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Macs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 300 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.
Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
Getting an honorary doctorate doesn't mean that people should call him Dr. Jobs.
From the sound of things this doesn't seem like an intentional attempt to infect users co punters via the App Store.
The iOS app itself is NOT malware, and works as its supposed to. The malware is for Win32, and can do nothing on an iOS device, or a Mac, is located deep inside the .app folder directory, and has no way of launching itself. The only way for it to spread, or even run at all would be:
Windows user browses to the iTunes backup folder .app file .exe.
For no particular reason at all decides to extract the contents of the
Decides to dig down a few directoies inside of that
Out of boredom decides to run the the infected
Rather than an intentional attempt to sneak Malware onto the App Store, it sounds more likely to me that the developer of the app was infected themselves, and unknowingly packaged it in the iOS app. Granted, Apple should be doing a virus scan before approving an App, but this malware is DOA barring the extremely unlikely scenario a user would have to do that I listed above for any chance of infection.
- "Scientia non habet inimicum nisp ignorantem"
Don't be so humble. You're not that great.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
MS Office runs just fine on my Mac. Which version are you using?
How does Windows malware get into an iOS app package? You can generally only develop iOS apps on OS X, so someone either purposely put it there, or has some retarded app development setup that managed to suck a windows virus into an iOS package..
Then it got deployed by Apple.
Then in order for it to infect a target PC, you got to screw around with the iOS package file on WIndows and then purposely run content (and ignore ALL the Windows warnings). Also the malware is generally already covered by most Windows anti-virus, so it would only be deployed if you didn't have anything installed, or not up-to-date in the last few years.
So I consider this an epic fail for all involved, Apple, Microsoft, the developer, the hacker, and anyone this infects because they are all being retarded.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
It's literally impossible for what you describe to work. iTunes can't be made to decompress a purchased ipa file and randomly run a windows executable in a random folder. If you knew anything about how .ipa's, iTunes, or had bothered to read and understand the article you'd know the only way for this malware to do anything would be for a windows user to follow a specific (and unlikely as hell) set of steps and intentionally infect themselves.
- "Scientia non habet inimicum nisp ignorantem"
No, it's a "You didn't read or understand the article" distortion field.
- "Scientia non habet inimicum nisp ignorantem"
Affects Windows. And we care why...?
So it seems everyone is not too concerned about the ability to bring malware unscathed through Apple app store? I understand the malware was a windows virus was packaged up quite well in the app, and dormant unless unpackaged and executables were ran. However, wouldn't it be possible to offer an update to the app that, if connected to a windows computer, unpacks and maybe even attempts to execute? If not through an update, perhaps offer a different app that performs the functionality? I realize these questions are far out there, but to me, passing malware through the screening process should be the hard part.
No trees were killed to send this message, but a great number of electrons were terribly inconvenienced.
Gee, I thought Apple's walled-garden approach was supposed to be really secure. I've seen a lot of Apple fanboys on slashdot recently mocking the Android model? Where are they now?
Oddly missing from the summary, the name of the infected App: "Instaquotes Quotes Cards for Instagram"
Did anyone else stop and think 'That's not really fair, Mountain Lion isn't THAT bad' when they read the headline?