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That one virus on the App Store was one of, if not the biggest known instance of a virus on the App Store, and your article gives a number four times smaller th
by jerbear4328 3y ago
That one virus on the App Store was one of, if not the biggest known instance of a virus on the App Store, and your article gives a number four times smaller than half a billion. From your [1]:
> But now, thanks to emails published as part of Apple's trial against Epic Games, we finally know how many iPhone users were impacted: 128 million in total, of which 18 million were in the US.
> "In total, 128M customers have downloaded the 2500+ apps that were affected LTD. Those customers drove 203M downloads of the 2500+ affected apps LTD," Dale Bagwell, who was Apple's manager of iTunes customer experience at the time, wrote in one of the emails.
> Apple also disclosed the apps that included the malicious code, some incredibly popular such as WeChat and the Chinese version of Angry Birds 2.
Still a huge deal, particularly in China, but considering all the virus really did was collect some device info (less information than most ad networks) (and maybe it was able to open URLs and popups on command)[1] and it was the biggest virus on the App Store ever (that I can find), maybe not as awful as you suggest.
The scams on the App Store, yeah that's pretty bad. Though, can you point me at a marketplace as big as the App Store without loads of scams?
[1]: https://www.lookout.com/blog/xcodeghost#what-does-it-do https://www.lookout.com/blog/xcodeghost#what-does-it-do
- pjerem 3y ago> all the virus really did was collect some device info (less information than most ad networks) Nah, that would mean that what really protects iOS users from malwares is just a good sandboxing mechanism and not the "human" control of the App Store. That would also mean that bypassing the App Store shouldn’t be a real security issue.
- ffgjgf1 3y agoIt’s pretty clear that it’s both. Claiming otherwise is a bit disingenuous. An app store with no human or automatic validation and not $100 would have a magnitude or two more malware.
- ric2b 3y agoCan you back that up with an example, perhaps the Android Play Store? Is there significantly more malware on recent (last ~5 years) versions of Android than similarly recent versions of iOS?
- paulmd 3y agoGoogle play store also uses human review. The question is whether there’s more malware on stores like f-droid, and the answer is yes, there is of course significantly more malware. This even pollutes the official Play Store to some extent because of course google can’t put the foot down too hard when Facebook et al can simply “start their own app stores” to bypass review if they really want to. Malware rates are much higher on android in general. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/09/joker-the-malware-that-signs-you-up-for-pricey-services-floods-android-markets/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/09/joker...
- egeozcan 3y ago> Though, can you point me at a marketplace as big as the App Store without loads of scams? Not the person you're replying to but isn't that the point?
- thefz 3y agoApple uses the excuse of security to hold a monopoly. You are shown that this is by no means as secure as they want you to believe. Then you argue that "of course, with a market that big!" So basically you are proving that Apple uses the excuse of security to hold a monopoly.
- AnthonyMouse 3y agoNot only that, it proves the opposite of the claim. Suppose there were multiple app marketplaces for iOS. Then some of them could be extremely selective by finding a niche, and thereby be more trustworthy than any unified store that has to carry a million general purpose apps with only cursory evaluation from various publishers of little or unknown reputation.
- fsflover 3y ago> > Though, can you point me at a marketplace as big as the App Store without loads of scams? GNU/Linux repositories.
- Arnt 3y agoThe biggest of those is NPM, I think, which appears to be between 50% and 100% as big as the app store. Let's call that equal in size, shall we? https://nitter.net/npm_malware https://nitter.net/npm_malware has twenty postings in the last 19 hours, quite far from "without".
- kaladin-jasnah 3y agoNPM is not a Linux repository.
- pmontra 3y agoNPM is also used by Windows an MacOS machines, and who knows which else. *BSD? Anything that runs JavaScript? Probably OP was thinking about the deb and rpm repositories of the main distributions but yes, NPM and the likes are other examples of large repositories.
- fsflover 3y agoYes, I meant deb/rpm repositories. NPM is not a Linux repo, it's multipurpose, with lots of proprietary software.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Arnt 3y agoIt's the open part of it that's comparable to the app store in size. The closed part is in addition. I agree there are linux-only repos that are ~1% of that size and contain little or no malware or abuse. That's true whether you measure size in updates per day or total count of packages, so 1% seems reachable without considerable malware problems.
- rakoo 3y ago> Though, can you point me at a marketplace as big as the App Store without loads of scams? Maybe the issue is being so big then. Which is exactly why the EU did this in the first place. So Apple has yet another lever to comply: reduce their size.