The company will also be alerting users to let them know if they have downloaded apps that could have been compromised.
Advertisement
It was discovered that these affected apps were all developed in China. Apple tracks iOS adoption by analysing visits to the App Store. Without actually going into details, Apple said that apps built with counterfeit code and intended to cause harm to iOS users have been removed from the App Store. Prior to this attack, a total of just five malicious apps had ever been found in the App Store, according to cyber security firm Palo Alto Networks Inc (PANW.N).
Mobile merchant terminal company iZettle has warned its users that the Bluetooth issues within Apple’s operating system could seriously affect payment processes, and has strongly warned merchants using its kit not to upgrade to iOS9 until it says so.
If you’re wondering which apps to worry about, some are quite popular, including the Chinese version of Angry Birds 2.
According to reports the malicious code spread through a counterfeit version of Apple’s Xcode tools used by developers to create apps for its iPhones and iPads.
But while there are steps users can take to combat malware on Android devices, fighting this rare iOS exploit is mostly up to the developers.
Developers in China opt for such third party downloads of Xcode because Apple’s own servers can be very slow within the country whilst local sources can provide very high speeds.
Even some well-known apps were found to have been infected – including the hugely popular mobile chat application WeChat. Their App store’s security infrastructure has been penetrated in a historic hack-attack, the likes of which has not been surpassed in the whole of the corporation’s history.
Advertisement
Apple Watch owners can update to watchOS 2 by opening the “Watch” app on their iPhone, selecting “General“, and then tapping “Software Update“. iOS 9 is required to download the update. watchOS 2 is approximately 500MB when installed over-the-air.
