Apple’s Whopping Hack

You will be shocked to know that the Apple’s biggest hack is somewhere linked with CIA (Central Intelligence Agency).

Few days back, some researchers founded that 39 iOS apps on Apple store are infected from ‘XCodeGhost Malware’. Now the worst part of this news is this infection is increasing exponentially. Now the number increases from 39 to 4,000. We can call it the Apple’s biggest hack ever.

This Malware is distributed by legal iOS apps via counterfeit versions of app developer toolkit called Xcode.

XCodeGhost is a very harmful malware that could Phish credentials, Hijack URLs. It is also capable of infecting the other apps and stealing the data from the iCloud such as passwords. It can also upload the stolen passwords to the hacker’s server without any knowledge of the user.

Infected Apps

The infected apps on the App Store includes some very popular apps such as WeChat, the photo editor Perfect 365, the card scanning app CamCard, the music streaming app NetEase, etc.

How it Links to CIA?

According to the document leaked by Edward Snowden, the technique used by XCodeGhost is very similar to the technique developed by CIA in March this year.

The leaked document shows the way how to manipulate XCode in an effort to add backdoors to the iOS apps on the App Store. The best thing about the technique is ‘even the developer is unknown from the backdoor in his app’.

The iOS apps that are developed using the modified version of XCode is capable to enable spies in the app and steal the personal information such as passwords and messages from the infected device along with sending the data to a command centre of its choice.

But it is still unclear that How CIA and other agencies would get the developers to use this infected version of XCode.

The answer of the question could be XCodeGhost, it has the same capabilities that of CIA technique and the way it infects Apps is also the same.

Apple has safeguarded its customers by saying that the company is working to remove the infected apps from the app store but there is no response to the question ‘whether Apple was aware of the CIA techniques for negotiating XCode’.

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