 Find and Call, believed to be the first malware that has sneaked into Apple's App Store, was removed Thursday. (SecureList) |
Apple may have removed the first piece of malware ever to sneak its way into the company's almost 4-year-old App Store.
The app, named Find and Call, sneaked its way into both Apple's App Store as well as Google Play, but the two digital stores removed the Trojan horse Thursday after being highlighted by the Kaspersky Lab, a Russian cyber security company, which wrote a report on the app.
Find and Call passed off as being just another address book app, but what it would actually do is ask users to register their email and phone number. After that, the app would offer to find friends from users' phone books, but it would actually grab that data and feed it to a remote server, according to the Kaspersky Lab's report.
Afterward, the malware would spam users' contacts with text messages that appeared to be sent from them, prompting them to also download the app.
"The 'from' field contains the user’s cellphone number," the report says. "In other words, people will receive an SMS spam message from a trusted source."
But Find and Call didn't stop there. If users go to its website, the app allows you to enter your information for your social networks, email address and even PayPal -- so you can transfer the company, which appears to be based out of Singapore, more.
Both Apple and Google removed the app from their respective digital market places Thursday.
As the report points out, malware is not unheard of in the Google Play store, but this is highly believed to be a first for Apple. That's too bad for the tech giant, too -- it is just five days away from the App Store's fourth birthday.
The news also piles on top of more bad news for the App Store, which has been plagued by a problem that has led to many recently updated apps being issued corrupted from the digital store. Those corrupted apps haven't caused any damage to users, but they do keep making the apps crash -- and that's led to a lot of one-star ratings for many developers.
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