This issue has made it into a number of different applications and programs, including WeChat.
A mobile security issue has now been identified, as app developers who downloaded some of the central Apple software components from locations other than the official App Store have unknowingly worked viruses into some of the most popular and well known applications.
The majority of these infected mobile apps were developed in China and are popular primarily in that country.
Apps for the iPhone, iPad and iPod have been threatened with this mobile security problem. The infected applications are riddled with malicious code that makes it possible for hackers to send device users to fraudulent websites that will collect their usernames and passwords for the sites they’re pretending to be. It can also reveal other forms of access data from the user. A number of apps, primarily in China, have now been found to be victims of this coding.
The mobile security problem was detected in WeChat, Didi Kuaidi, and CamCard, among many others.
Didi Kuaidi is a popular rideshare service in China and CamCard is a contacts application. WeChat is a massively used messaging app. They report of their infection was made by the Palo Alto Networks company, last week. Over the weekend, Apple did acknowledge that this was a problem, but it placed the blame of the use of third party copes of its Xcode free app development program. It stated that the infected apps were all built on Xcode that was not downloaded directly from the App Store.
This app security issue underscores the risks associated with using apps from unofficial app stores, and of the Chinese Internet system as a whole. Palo Alto Networks stated that software developers in the country may have chosen to use Xcode from a third party source after it took too long for them to try to obtain it from the official source.
It is only just recently that Apple started data storage on servers located in China. This has made it much faster for the millions of consumers in China to be able to use their iPhones to access their documents, pictures and movies. The mobile security issue could have been the result of slow speeds happening before that time, or it could be something that is continuing as (by the time of the writing of this article), Apple had not stated whether or not it stores apps in servers in China, too.
