“Mystery has long shrouded how Apple vets iPhone, iPad, and iPod apps for safety,” David Talbot reports for technology Review.
“Now, researchers who managed to get a malicious app up for sale in the App Store have determined that the company’s review process runs at least some programs for only a few seconds before giving the green light,” Talbot reports. “This wasn’t long enough for Apple to notice that an app that purported to offer news from Georgia Tech contained code fragments that later assembled themselves into a malicious digital creature.”
Talbot reports, “The Jekyll app was live for only a few minutes in March, and no innocent victims installed it, Lu says. During that brief time, the researchers installed it on their own Apple devices and attacked themselves, then withdrew the app before it could do real harm… By monitoring the app, [the researchers] could tell that Apple ran it for only a few seconds prior to releasing it.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Obviously, Apple’s three college interns, err… “iOS App Approval Department” needs to do a much better job here, especially since this is one of iOS’s significant and growing advantages over certain other malware-infested mobile OSes.
Wouldn’t wait to piss that advantage away by being cheap and/or incompetent and/or lazy, right, Tim?
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