We believe that this malware family heralds a new era in malware attacking Apple’s desktop and mobile platforms based on the following characteristics:
- Of known malware families distributed through trojanized / repackaged OS X applications, it is the biggest in scale we have ever seen
- It is only the second known malware family that attacks iOS devices through OS X via USB
- It is the first malware to automate generation of malicious iOS applications, through binary file replacement
- It is the first known malware that can infect installed iOS applications similar to a traditional virus
- It is the first in-the-wild malware to install third-party applications on non-jailbroken iOS devices through enterprise provisioning
WireLurker was used to trojanize 467 OS X applications on the Maiyadi App Store, a third-party Mac application store in China. In the past six months, these 467 infected applications were downloaded over 356,104 times and may have impacted hundreds of thousands of users.
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