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APPLE has confirmed that 17 applications have been removed from the App Store after they were found to be secretly committing fraud behind users’ backs to quietly collect advertising revenue from their smartphones. Here’s which apps were called out, so you can immediately delete any that are still sitting pretty on your iOS home screen.
If you’ve got any of these 17 apps saved on your iPhone, you’d best delete them as soon as possible.
Apple has confirmed the applications have now been wiped from its App Store, but you’ll still need to manually delete them from your smartphone if you’d already downloaded and run the software. The apps, which were all created by a single developer, were maliciously collecting advertising revenue behind iPhone owners’ backs.
The warning comes just hours after Android users were cautioned to delete a number of malicious apps from Google’s rival Play Store.
Mobile security firm Wandera sniffed-out the malicious software made available for iPhone owners worldwide. For users, it would be almost impossible to tell that anything was wrong, since the apps did exactly what they promised on the tin… except that they were secretly fraud in the background on your iPhone too.
“The objective of most clicker trojans is to generate revenue for the attacker on a pay-per-click basis by inflating website traffic. They can also be used to drain the budget of a competitor by artificially inflating the balance owed to the ad network,” the security firm explains.
Although the apps weren’t designed to cause any direct harm to users or their smartphones themselves, the nefarious behind-the-scenes activity would drain mobile data faster than usual, so if you’re not on an unlimited 4G plan – it would cost you each month. Secondly, the activity from the apps could also cost you precious battery life, as well as slowing down your phone, since it’s having to process all the extra ad requests.
So, deleting the software could see a drop in any additional monthly charges from your network provider, faster performance, as well as a few more hours battery life, which are all pretty substantial benefits.
Wandera claims these iPhone apps were able to Apple’s stringent review process since the malicious code was never inside the apps themselves – therefore there was nothing for Apple to detect when scanning them before allowing them onto the App Store. Instead, the apps would receive instructions to begin their activities from a remote server hosted by the developers.
Apple says it’s now improving the app review process to stop this happening in future.
Daily Express
