Apple recently had multiple apps in its app store tainted with the malware XcodeGhost, and now are cracking down on the security in the app store. According to the International Business Times the apps infected were mostly posted onto the app store by Chinese developers and were highlighted by a Chinese version of “Angry Birds 2”.
The company offers a free app development tool known as Xcode, but some foreign developers have taken to downloading the program from third party hosts causing those versions to get infected with the malware. So these developers used this program and then posted their apps to Apple’s app store not knowing that they had used a tainted version of the software.
Now Apple is taking steps to ensure that people do not download these tainted apps, as well as creating a way for the developers that made and posted said apps could check if the program they used was indeed the XcodeGhost version rather than the safe Xcode. The company will post a support page showing the top apps tainted by this malware and make people aware that if they do have the apps on their devices they need to be deleted until a cleaner version of the app is developed.
Apple is now working with outside security companies to see which apps are affected by this in an effort to remove them from the app store. They have also made the clean Xcode available on Chinese servers, so the download time is faster because what was leading the developers to download the program from a third party was the slow download time on account of having to download from a foreign server.