In 2015, a pretty significant hack occurred that ended up infecting countless people’s phones with malware thanks to the over 4,000 apps that were added to the Apple App Store that all had this malware in them. A lot of people are aware that this issue occurred, but one thing that they might not be aware of is the scope of the attack. This basically means that no one knows for sure how many people were impacted, but all of this has now been revealed.
The revelation came during the trial of Fortnite’s parent company Epic Games which Apple is currently in the process of pursuing litigation against. The proceedings of this trial revealed emails that showed a total of about 128 million users ended up downloading one of the apps that contained this kind of malware, and the lion’s share of these users, 55% to be precise, live in China. 66% of the downloads came from these Chinese users as well, so the bulk of the hack occurred in that part of the world.
With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that the US wasn’t exactly safe from the hack in question which used a malware that was named XCodeGhost. About 18 million people in the US were also impacted, and this might end up being a huge problem for Apple now that it has come to light due to the reason that the US requires companies to notify users about any and all data breaches that might have affected them.
The truly dangerous aspect of this is that the hackers managed to manipulate Xcode which is Apple’s own software that can be used for the development of apps so this is a very high level breach which should definitely have been brought to the attention of users. Basically, the fact that Apple failed to inform specific users when they had that data available to them could result in action being taken against the tech platform, and if there is one thing that the US government loves to do it’s take tech companies to account.
The revelation came during the trial of Fortnite’s parent company Epic Games which Apple is currently in the process of pursuing litigation against. The proceedings of this trial revealed emails that showed a total of about 128 million users ended up downloading one of the apps that contained this kind of malware, and the lion’s share of these users, 55% to be precise, live in China. 66% of the downloads came from these Chinese users as well, so the bulk of the hack occurred in that part of the world.
With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that the US wasn’t exactly safe from the hack in question which used a malware that was named XCodeGhost. About 18 million people in the US were also impacted, and this might end up being a huge problem for Apple now that it has come to light due to the reason that the US requires companies to notify users about any and all data breaches that might have affected them.
The truly dangerous aspect of this is that the hackers managed to manipulate Xcode which is Apple’s own software that can be used for the development of apps so this is a very high level breach which should definitely have been brought to the attention of users. Basically, the fact that Apple failed to inform specific users when they had that data available to them could result in action being taken against the tech platform, and if there is one thing that the US government loves to do it’s take tech companies to account.
