Late on Sunday night, Apple revealed to Reuters that it has started cleaning up the App Store to remove apps that are infected by the malware that has spread when making applications with 'XcodeGhost'.
This is the first time that the App Store has been the subject of a malware attack of this scale, more than 50 infected apps which were used by millions of iOS users around the world. This includes some popular apps like WeChat, Angry Birds 2, Eyes Wide, or CamCard that are used by millions of iOS users around the world.
We have removed apps from the App Store that we know were created with this counterfeit software, Apple spokeswoman Christine Monaghan said in an email. We are working with the developers to make sure you are using the correct version of Xcode to rebuild your applications.
Apple has not provided any solution for users who already have the infected applications installed on their iPhone or iPad, but logically the first thing we should do is remove that application from our iOS device. Malicious software 'XcodeGhost' directly affects the Xcode compiler to iOS y OS X which were used by Chinese developers to create their applications. These applications were uploaded to the App Store where they successfully passed Apple's review and were made available for your public download.
How has all this happened?. Xcode is a program that is downloaded for free from Apple's servers. But it seems that in China it is quite common for developers to use copies hosted on other unofficial servers like Baidu. An infected copy uploaded to this storage service would have been the origin of this new security threat for iOS.
