The price of being the industry leader

Malware target Macs and iOS devices, delivered through a Chinese Mac app store:

Palo Alto Network explains that the malware has so far infected 467 applications designed for Apple’s Mac OS X operating system. It’s done that via a third-party Chinese Mac application store called the Maiyadi App Store. Over the last six months, those applications have been downloaded over 356,104 times—possibly infecting the Macs of hundreds of thousands of users.

But the malware also appears to infect iOS devices when they’re plugged into a Mac via USB.“WireLurker monitors any iOS device connected via USB with an infected OS X computer and installs downloaded third-party applications or automatically generated malicious applications onto the device, regardless of whether it is jailbroken,” explains Palo Alto Networks. “This is the reason we call it ‘wire lurker.’”

Read more at Gizmodo.

This is the price of being the industry leader, being targeted by these sorts of things. The Mac has been more or less malware and virus free for so long, it was bound to change. As for iOS, it’s obviously less sensitive for malware and viruses since they’d have to get into the App Store first, but it both can and will happen. Then there’s workarounds such as the one mentioned above, and if you jailbreak you need to take additional measures.