Apple has been telling us for a long time that there's no need to worry about the security of their iPhones and iPads. The operating system itself is just too good to need to be concerned about such things. iOS just won't give you the problems that Windows used to. Ooops!
A mobile Trojan that secretly sends the phone's whereabouts and its address book to spammers has slipped into Apple's App Store and Google's Play marketplace.
If the safety device that means that an iPhone cannot get malware is the Apple Store for apps then that safety's not worth all that much if malware manages to get through the Apple Store.
Admittedly, this trojan isn't trying to steal your bank account: all it does is access your address book and send that information to the server. From where it us used to spam your address book to buy the same software. An attempt to get a network effect going rather than anything more sinister. But still not a good advertisement for how you never need to worry about malware on Apple, eh?
The app is mostly likely the first piece of malware to make it past Apple's censors and reviewers and onto the App Store in the shop's five years of operation - provided you discount a proof-of-concept program developed and released by white hat hacker Charlie Miller last year.
I'll repeat what I've said many times before: yes, I'm sure that iOS (and OSX and Android) are much more secure than Windows used to be. But I do not think that that protects them completely against malicious code. Rather, I think that part (note please, part) of the reason that we've not seen mass attempts at writing such code is simply because until very recently there just wasn't a large population of such OSs in operation. Now there is, presenting a juicy target and I'm sure that we're going to see more attempts. I'll even agree that those attempts will have a much lower success rate than the old Windows ones: but I'm sure that some of them will still be successful, enough to become a problem.
