Apple withdraws some China apps after malware found

Among the other impacted apps were Didi Chuxing, which is the leading taxi-hailing service in China. (NASDAQ:AAPL) provides developers to build apps for iOS.

All the due-diligence in the world could not stop the ironclad iOS App store from falling prey to malware.

According to multiple security research firms, numerous widely used apps such as mobile chat app WeChat, which boasts almost 500 million active users, have been compromised. After the XcodeGhost embedded malicious code onto these apps, personal device and app information could be uploaded to the malware’s command and control server.

The malicious code is called the ‘XcodeGhost.’ The malware was able to infiltrate apps because developers downloaded a fake version of Apple’s Xcode toolkit.

Shares of Apple Inc were relatively higher during the trading session today outperforming the broader indices which is being seen as a huge positive. In fact, there have only ever been five malicious apps found in the Apple App Store… until now. WeChat has more than 50 million users and the malware planted by the hackers in the app puts all of them in jeopardy. As per MacRumors, the infected Xcode versions include 6.1 and 6.4.

Still, the hack remains significant. Hopefully developers and gadget manufacturers learn something from this event and will be more rigorous when it comes to reviewing apps before making them available to users.

On Monday, Apple confirmed that dozens of apps infected with malware had been unwittingly published to the App Store.

As Josh Horwitz writes in Quartz, websites based outside of China are slower than sites within the country because the activity is monitored by the government. In addition, the file size is relatively large and Baidu is an easy alternative to Apple servers.

Reuters The company’s logo in the lobby of New York’s flagship Apple store.

Apple is working to find and fix infected apps – but they’re still looking, so we could definitely learn about more hacked apps in the days ahead. Users have been asked to delete the apps that are on the blacklist, which should clear the exploit. Moreover, passwords should also be changed throughout the ecosystem as an added precaution. Cybersecurity experts say it just goes to show that any device, including those running Apple’s iOS software, can be vulnerable to hackers.