Popular iPhone apps hacked and distributed via third-party means

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Last fall, the iPhone was recognized as the securest mobile phone in the market and according to Market Watch data, experts arrived at the conclusion that Apple devices protect users’ information in the most reliable way. But despite this fact, many people tend to make use of a VPN for iPhone with the purpose to encrypt the data transmitted over they send over the network.

This is nothing if not on purpose. Apple gadgets and its collection of iPhone apps in the App Store are still vulnerable to breaches. The incident that occurred in February of this year proves this to be true.

Bad actors managed to hack a set of popular apps for the iPhone. Spotify, Angry Birds, Pokemon Go, and Minecraft are only a few examples of the applications affected. By means of the developer’s certificates, available for Apple team members only, hackers cracked apps and started to share them free of charge through third-party distribution channels.

iPhone apps
Image courtesy Forbes

Among the distributors of the hacked iPhone apps were TutuApp, Panda Helper, AppValley, and TweakBox. One of them even offers a free version of the Minecraft app, which costs US$7 on the App Store.

In response to this incident, Apple is going to implement a strict authentication system for developers to prevent such cases in the future. Hacked iPhone apps aren’t the only vulnerability plaguing iPhones at the moment. Presumably, if you are doing an app search in the App Store you can restart the phone by saying the word hyphen 5 times. This seems to affect some users but not all.

What’s interesting is that both the English and Russian word “hyphen” causes the issue. It is expected that the upcoming system upgrade will solve this problem with the hyphen crash. But users can sometimes be critical towards iOS updates. Apple’s updates don’t always go smoothly and new bugs and problems can arise.

iPhone apps

The latest update (iOS 12.1.4) was meant to prevent eavesdropping through FaceTime. A significant feature, isn’t it?

However, a growing number of iPhone users report that after the update of their devices some malfunctioning of the system was observed. After the iOS update to version 12.1.4, some reported that LTE modules became slow. Still, others reported that the update killed the ability for the iPhone to see networks.

The worst part is that sometimes the iPhones will not recognize the users SIM card. As a result, users are without communication with the outside world, which is quite inconvenient in the 21st century.

Of course, it would be foolish to ignore the regular updates of the system, as they are vital for user data protection and online safety. It’s recommended to update iPhones regularly, as it allows fixing known problems. Hackers are always finding new ways to introduce malware or get into your devices. This is why developers are continually updating their apps and Apple pushes out iOS updates on the norm.

On the whole, it up to you do decide what to do: update your iPhone and be sure hackers won’t compromise your data, or skip it and enjoy a relatively bug-free working iPhone.

Last Updated on February 3, 2021.

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