Author: Nick Farrell

Chinese hack US post

Posted on November 11, 2014 by - News

postman_file_640_4806bc074ad1dChinese government hackers are suspected of breaching the computer networks of the United States Postal Service, compromising the data of more than 800,000 employees — including the postmaster general.

According to the FBI, the intrusion was discovered in mid-September, said officials, who declined to comment on who was thought to be responsible.

The announcement comes just as President Barak Obama arrived in Beijing for high-level talks with his counterpart, President Xi Jinping.

China has consistently denied accusations that it engages in cybertheft and notes that Chinese law prohibits cybercrime. But China has been tied to several recent intrusions, including one into the computer systems of the Office of Personnel Management and another into the systems of a government contractor, USIS, that conducts security-clearance checks.  Of course the US spooks have been doing the same thing in China, so it is a matter of all is fair in love and cold war.

The only question is why did the Chinese spooks think that hacking a the postal service was a good idea.

Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe said in a statement that it was an unfortunate fact of life these days that every organisation connected to the Internet is a constant target for cyber intrusion activity. “The United States Postal Service is no different. “Fortunately, we have seen no evidence of malicious use of the compromised data and we are taking steps to help our employees protect against any potential misuse of their data,” he said.

The compromised data included names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, addresses, dates of employment and other information, officials said. The data of every employee were exposed.

No customer credit card information from post offices or online purchases at usps.com was breached, officials said.

While the OPM and USIS breaches involved data of people who had gone through security clearances and so could be useful to a foreign government seeking to gain access to individuals in sensitive government work, it is not clear why Postal Service employees would be of such interest.

Why Apple’s corporate plans are doomed

Posted on November 11, 2014 by - News, Opinions

Map09_oh_noes_two_elementalsKing of consumer toys, Apple is attempting its biggest push into the consumer market, according to Reuters.

Reuters claims that Apple is hiring a dedicated sales force just to talk with potential clients like Citigroup.

This is on top of its partnership with IBM to develop apps for corporate clients and sell them on devices, the iPhone maker plans to challenge sector leaders HP, Dell, Oracle and SAP.

Of course no one is saying much in the way of details, Reuters seems to think that the deal with Big Blue will mean that Apple will be welcomed into the corporate world and give HP and Dell a kicking.  This will result in the collapse of Microsoft, Samsung and Google’s own efforts in mobile work applications.

Apparently Job’s Mob is working closely with a group of startups, including ServiceMax and PlanGrid, that already specialise in selling apps to corporate America. Apple is already in talks with other mobile enterprise developers to bring them into a more formal partnership.

For example, PlanGrid is a mobile app for construction workers to share and view blueprints. ServiceMax is a mobile app that makes it easy for companies to manage fleets of field service technicians by ensuring they have access to the right information.

ServiceMax, whose existing customers include Procter & Gamble (PG.N) and DuPont, has co-hosted eight dinners with Apple over the past year in locations across the United States. About 25 or 30 chief information officers and “chief service officers” typically show up at these joint marketing and sales events.

But there are huge problems with Reuter’s desire to see Apple in charge of the world. The most obvious is that Apple makes toys it does not make corporate devices. Corporates are obsessed with security, Apple’s iCloud can’t even protect b list celebs from having their naked pictures being hacked.

Tablets were an Apple inspired Fad and any belief that corporates will rush to buy them never really happened. If they are ever adopted by corporates, they will be a low-level function which will require something a lot cheaper than Jobs’ Mob wants to support. Apple really needed BYOD to take off, which it didn’t.

Apple’s success has been due to its cult following, but religion does not work very well when it comes to business. Apple lacks functionality with business systems, corporates also take a dim view of the sort of things that Apple user agreements desire from their followers. Apple is also slow to confirm security flaws, and even slower to fix them. Its insistence on its own security, rather than that of the client also does not sit well with big business.

In short, to get business customers, Apple needs to change its mentality – something historically it has been unable to do. It not only has to deal with the experts in business, such as Microsoft, HP, Dell and SAP, its traditional rivals, such as Samsung are also harbour similar ambitions.

Samsung has confirmed that it is stepping up its efforts to sell devices to large enterprise clients and hired former chief information officer Robin Bienfait to spearhead that effort. It might hit the same experience problems that Apple has, and there is no reason to suspect it will be any more successful.

Apple’s IBM partnership might not be that key to the corporations either. It relies on IBM’s sales team selling Apple projects. IBM has as much experience selling consumer products as Apple has selling into business. Jobs’ Mob also has no clue about business software, which is the key to getting into the business market — for decades its networking technology has been the weak point of the few Apple installations in corporates.

Apple appears to hope that if it can hook the client on the software and content, they will keep them coming back for the hardware. However, that simply does not work in the corporates. Hell, Microsoft was unable to get corporates to upgrade to Windows 7 because they could not see a need.  What chance does Apple’s business model have against that attitude?

Google did evil to the Berlin Wall

Posted on November 10, 2014 by - News

ap6108231298-ab0817725a55e10f913b3d4d8f1ba2d18f00f8d4-s6-c30 Over the weekend, Google celebrated the Fall of the Berlin Wall with one of its doodles, failing to note its part in the history of one of the sections.

According to the Google Doodle team, they  “took a short bike ride from our Mountain View, California headquarters to our local public library to study an actual piece of the Berlin Wall.” These segments of the Berlin Wall were featured in the Doodle.

What the post fails to mention is how the two sections ended up at the library and how it might not have had to do that cycle ride if it had taken a less evil interest in history sooner.

The 12-foot-tall remnants sections of wall were bought over to the US by German-born businessman Frank Golzen. It all seemed fair enough. After all, they were spoils of a war which the US had spent a lot of time and money winning and made a suitable monument to the victory. They were placed in the Bayside Business Plaza where they were a lot more attractive than many of the other things on the estate and provided a bit of history that is missing in many Industrial Parks.

In 2012, Google bought the entire park, did not like the inclusion of the two sections of the Berlin Wall, and gave the Golzen family until summer 2013 to take the historic Berlin Wall out of the industrial park.

A 2012 City of Mountain View Staff Report stated that although the donating family has until next summer to remove the installation from the current location, their preference (and the preference of the new owner of the property) was to remove it sooner.

However, the recommendation to relocate the seven-ton concrete slabs to remote Charleston Park, adjacent to the Googleplex, was nixed by the City Council, who voted instead to move the Berlin Wall sections to its current home in front of a downtown public library. The walls were moved and re-dedicated in November last year.

 

Apple conducted a “bait and switch” on GT Advanced

Posted on November 10, 2014 by - News

6a01053686a547970c017d3e73793e970c-piCourt documents appear to show that Apple sank GT Advanced by offering it what would have been its largest sale ever and then changed the terms of the agreement after it was too late for the smaller company to go elsewhere.

In documents unsealed by a US  Bankruptcy Court in Springfield, Massachusetts, GT Advanced Chief Operating Officer Daniel Squiller says Apple conducted a bait and switch which brought the company to its knees.

GT Advanced, a maker of sapphire furnaces that supplied sapphire material to Apple for its smartphone screens, filed for Chapter 11 protection but has refused to publicly explain why it had imploded, because of  confidentiality clauses which Apple forced it to sign.

All this came to light because Judge Henry Boroff denied requests by the companies to keep some of the documents in the case under seal.

Last year, GT Advanced outfitted a plant owned by Apple in Mesa, Arizona with furnaces that it would use to make scratch-resistant sapphire exclusively for Apple.

“With a classic bait-and-switch strategy, Apple presented GTAT with an onerous and massively one-sided deal in the fall of 2013,” Squiller wrote.

At the start of negotiations, Apple offered to buy 2,600 sapphire growing furnaces from GT Advanced, which GT Advanced would operate on behalf of Apple, the “ultimate technology client to land,” according to Squiller.

“In hindsight, it is unclear whether Apple even intended to purchase any sapphire furnaces from GTAT,” he wrote.

Apple offered a deal, under which it would shift away economic risk by lending GT Advanced the money to build the furnaces and grow the sapphire, and then sell it exclusively to Apple for less than market value, Squiller wrote.

GT Advanced was effectively forced to accept the unfair deal in October 2013 because its intense negotiations with Apple had left it unable to pursue deals with other smartphone makers, he said.

However, Apple called GT Advanced’s accusations “scandalous and defamatory” and said that the statements are intended to vilify Apple and portray “Apple as a coercive bully.”

It said GT Advanced was eager to make a deal, and pointed to a jump of over 20 percent in the shares of GT Advanced after it was unveiled.

Blizzard boss wades into Gamergate

Posted on November 10, 2014 by - News

558_L-narikoBlizzard Entertainment’s president and CEO Michael Morhaime surprised the software industry by referring negatively to Gamergate.

For those who came in late, Gamergate is a campaign by backward misogynistic gamers to chase women from the industry with death threats and online harassment so that they can continue to play games where big-breasted women are saved by men. All this is done under a pretext that women gaming journalists are corrupt.

Morhaime has to be careful, after all, he sells many games to people who support Gamergate and have views about women which make cavemen look enlightened. He did not mention he was talking about Gamergate but it is not difficult to spot the thread.

“Over the past couple months; there’s been a  group of people who have been doing really awful things. They have been making some people’s lives miserable, and they have been tarnishing our reputation as gamers… “It’s not right.”

Blizzcon is a great example of how positive and uplifting gaming can be,” Morhaime added—speaking to his company’s long-running convention dedicated to its small but enormously popular handful of games. “Let’s carry the good the good vibes from this weekend out into the world all year round.”

“There is another person on the other end of the chat screen,” he continued, making a strong reference to the online harassment that has flared up unpleasantly in recent months. “They’re our friends, our brothers and sisters, our sons and daughters.”

“Let’s take a stand to reject hate and harassment,” Morhaime said.

“Let’s redouble our efforts to be kind and respectful to one another. And let’s remind the world what the gaming community is really all about.”

FCC leaks terrible net neutrality decision

Posted on November 7, 2014 by - News

face-palmThe US FCC was expected to bow to public pressure and allow some semblance of net neutrality in the Land of the Free.

It was to be a brave move – after all a huge chunk of the FCC has connections with phone companies and the watchdog is widely seen as being in the telco pockets.

But the problem was that a huge chunk of the American public had told the FCC that they did not want the telcos strangling their bandwidth or making them pay extra for a reasonable service. In fact, more than four million Americans made it clear to the FCC that they were not going to stand for this thing.

However a new leak shows that the FCC is considering a proposal which it is called a hybrid proposal. It would expand the FCC’s powers to regulate broadband while also allowing cable providers to charge more money for fast lanes.

The “hybrid” proposal now under consideration has not been finalised but according to media leaks and discussions with interested parties they would expand the FCC’s powers to regulate broadband while also allowing a carve out for cable providers to charge more money for fast lanes. However, the rules will only allow the FCC to intervene to promote competition.

The idea is that would not upset the comms companies because they would be allowed to do what they like.

All those people who voted against such a scheme are a little miffed. Apparently, they thought if enough people voted against such a scheme the US government would have to listen. After all the US is supposed to be a democracy and follow the will of the majority and not corporates.

Apparently not.

Protesters having been gathering outside the White House and in a dozen US cities to demonstrate against a “hybrid” solution now being considered to end a stalemate over regulating the internet.

 

Universal Credit IT pilot project about to fail

Posted on November 7, 2014 by - News

system-failure-computer-greenWord on the street is that the government’s Universal Credit pilot project is set to fail and the Parliamentary Work and Pensions Committee will be grilling the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions and then serving him in a white wine sauce.

So far all the statistical evidence on how successful Universal Credit has been with the one percent of claimants who have been taken on board is being kept under wraps. However, it appears that under the scheme rent arrears have soared to 90 percent and that the largest landlord was moaning like crazy.

It is possible that it will cost £500m to write off  the IT involved in the project.

A Channel 4 whistleblower confirmed that the IT still only works for single claimants and after four years, and £750 million spent on the project, complex cases are still done manually.

The DWP says that is not true and the project is all a box of fluffy ducks, although apparently the box is tenanted by ducks who can’t pay the rent.

Peter Fitzhenry of Warrington’s largest landlord, the Golden Gates Housing said that only one or two tenants have been offered personal budgeting support from DWP that was promised under Universal Credit. He also says that even when rent payments are received directly from DWP, they are often incorrect, or do not include the tenants’ names.

The government appears to be getting ready to blame the supplier, ATOS, and this is because the project was awarded under Labour.  However, that might cause a few problems because ATOS was not a ministerial decision and was decided by the civil service. Rather than this being Labour’s fault, it might be a civil service person whose pinstriped bottom is still gracing her or his Whitehall chair.

Luxembourg Amazon deal under EU scrutiny

Posted on November 7, 2014 by - News

luxembourg_villeEU watchdogs are investigating how Amazon avoided paying billions in tax using a dodgy deal with the Luxembourg government.

Leaked tax documents from accounting firm PwC in Luxembourg show how Amazon sidesteps the 30 percent tax rates so they can price rivals out of the market.

The Luxembourg documents, obtained in a review led by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, contain some of the first hard numbers and details on how Amazon pays virtually no tax for its non-US earnings.

The deal was hatched in secret in 2003 and was part of a cunning plan by Amazon after it was investigated by French tax authorities and the US Internal Revenue Service. In 2011, Amazon reported US tax authorities were demanding $1.5 billion in federal tax and penalties covering 2005 to 2011 in connection with the royalties payments. In 2012 the French government slapped a $252 million tax bill on Amazon. The company is appealing both matters in court.

So to fix this problem, Amazon hatched up a deal with teeny weeny countryLuxembourg. Almost all Amazon’s income outside the US ends up in a Luxembourg company, Amazon EU Sàrl, which was the beneficiary last year when Amazon notched up £4.3 billion ($7.9 billion) of sales in the UK and paid only £4.2 million in income tax.

A secret appendix to an annual report filed with the Luxembourg government shows the missing cash went in two related-party deals. Amazon EU paid €379 million in “service fee expense” and €519 million in royalties to Amazon Europe Holding Technologies.

So, in other words, Amazon Europe paid €105 million to Amazon Technologies in Nevada to license the rights to Amazon’s intellectual property – the patents and software for the websites, including that button that buys a book with one click.

Amazon Europe onsold the rights to use this intellectual property to Amazon EU for €519 million – five times what it had paid the US Company. ­Amazon Europe made an instant profit of €414 million, which would have been taxable, except that Amazon Europe is a limited partnership and does not pay tax in Luxembourg.

Amazon EU ended up paying 0.5 per cent tax. Amazon Europe’s money ended up tax-free in Gibraltar.

Luxembourg is not exactly being forthcoming about providing information about the deal either. In fact, the European Commission complained that Luxembourg has provided only limited information about the Amazon deal.

This is causing problems because there is nearly €1.2 billion of cash generated by Amazon which is missing. Some think the cash might have been “invested” in Amazon Data Services Ireland. However, either way it is proving very difficult to find.

Zalman loses its cool over dodgy deals

Posted on November 7, 2014 by - News

Melting-ice-polar-bearCooling product company Zalman has gone bankrupt following the discovery of some somewhat unorthodox actions by its CEO and vice presidents.

The South Korean company was thought to be doing well, as its products were under the bonnet of rather a lot of PCs.

The reason for its bankruptcy is not anything to do with its own products or performance, in fact this news shocked Zalman employees. What appears to have happened is that the company has collapsed is due to the actions of its parent company Moneual, and its CEO and vice presidents.

Moneual CEO Harold Park, and vice presidents Scott Park and Won Duck-yeok, have, or so it is alleged, spent the last five years producing fraudulent documentation relating to the sales performance of Zalman.

They had been giving inflated sales figures and export data for Zalman’s products to get loans from the bank, it’s alleged.

By increasing sales and exports, Park and his associates were able to secure bank loans totalling $2.98 billion, it’s alleged.

According to The Korea Times, Moneual failed to repay its huge export bonds that matured on October 20, 2014, and filed for bankruptcy.  Zalman’s stock price also began a quick downfall. However, the numbers just do not add up – Moneual has been repeatedly reporting major profits, with their 2013 annual report being nearly 1.2 billion dollars in sales and over 100 million dollars in profit. Regulators investigated and it appears that there was evidence of a well-designed corporate fraud.

Moneual allegedly acquired Zalman in 2011 as part of the fraud. They are said to have forged Zalman’s export and accounting documents, greatly overstating their export and income reports, in order to become eligible for huge bank loans. The employees knew that the company was a sham but, despite the unearthly profit reports of the past few years, no government officials noticed.

Moneual received about $620 million in loans from several Korean banks and another 275 million dollars as export credit from the Korea Trade Insurance Corp, making the owners of Moneual richer by nearly $900 million.

The company’s owners have been arrested and, alongside many top and mid-level executives of the company, are now facing prison if convicted of the charges. However Harold Park has US citizenship and his brother has Canadian, and there’s some concerns that Korean law could face trouble prosecuting them.

No one expects Zalman to survive. The company does hold a number of patents relating to cooling and fan noise reduction technology and it seems likely a patent sale will happen eventually. However, these are unlikely to be worth $3 billion.

Nvidia turns in good results

Posted on November 7, 2014 by - News

nvidia-gangnam-style-330pxGraphics chip maker Nvidia posted higher fiscal third quarter revenue than many of the cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street expected.

Revenue in the fiscal third-quarter ended Oct. 26 was $1.225 billion, up 16 percent from the year-ago quarter, compared with Wall Street’s random guess of $1.202 billion.

For the current fourth quarter, Nvidia said it expects revenue of $1.20 billion, plus or minus two percent. Analysts on average expected fourth quarter revenue of $1.198 billion.

Third-quarter net profit was $173 million compared to $119 million a year ago.

Nvidia did better by focusing on using its Tegra chips to in entertainment and advanced navigation systems in cars made by companies including Volkswagen’s Audi, BMW and Tesla.

In the third quarter, revenue from Tegra chips for automobiles and mobile devices jumped 51 percent to $168 million. Nvidia’s PC graphics chip business expanded 13 percent to $991 million.

German publisher realises Google calls the shots

Posted on November 6, 2014 by - News

history-of-print-16th-century-printing-companyGerman publisher Axel Springer has just worked out what the rest of the world already knew – Google controls the press.

Springer has scrapped a move to block Google from running snippets of articles from its newspapers, saying that the experiment had caused traffic to its sites to plunge.

Traffic flowing from clicks on Google search results fell by 40 percent and traffic delivered via Google News had plummeted by 80 percent in the past two weeks.  This mimicked what happened when Google changed its algorithm and destroyed many tech news sites overnight.

A two-week-old experiment to restrict access by Google to some of its publications had caused web traffic to plunge for these sites.

He discovered, somewhat belatedly that publishers no longer decide who sees their content, it is more or less decided when Google decides who will appear in its search items.

Chief Executive Mathias Doepfner said his company would have “shot ourselves out of the market” if it had continued with its demands for the US firm to pay licensing fees. Springer had sought to restrict Google’s use of news from four of its top-selling brands: welt.de, computerbild.de, sportbild.de and autobild.de, the company said.

Springer, which publishes Europe’s top-selling daily newspaper Bild, said Google’s grip over online audiences was too great to resist, a double-edged compliment meant to ram home the publisher’s criticism of what it calls Google’s monopoly powers.

Publishers in countries from Germany and France to Spain have pushed to pass new national copyright laws that force Google and other web aggregators to pay licensing fees – dubbed the Google Tax – when they publish snippets of their news articles.

Under German legislation that came into effect last year, publishers can prohibit search engines and similar services from using their news articles beyond headlines. Last week, Spain’s upper house passed a similar law giving publishers an “inalienable” right to levy such licensing fees on Google.

The only problem is that if they do that, they end up cutting their own throats.

 

 

Lenovo sees a 19 per cent jump in profit

Posted on November 6, 2014 by - News

lenovo2Lenovo reported a 19 percent jump in profit in the second quarter, but revenue fell short of what the cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street expected.

Quarterly revenue rose seven percent to $10.5 billion, but sales from its mobile device division fell six percent to $1.4 billion.

The ThinkPad maker tightened its hold over global PC sales even as the broader market shrunk. Sales of both laptops rose 0.9 percent and desktops sales increased by 6.4 percent.

Net profit was $262 million, exceeding the $260 million expected by analysts.

The company additionally named Jerry Yang, the Yahoo co-founder, to its board of directors. Yang, who is also an Alibaba Group Holding Ltd director, formerly served as a Lenovo board observer.

On October 1, Lenovo bought  IBM’s low-end server business. Of the transactions, Lenovo said that the acquisition will make Lenovo the third largest player in the global and the number one player in the China x86 server market.

“This has enabled Lenovo to capture the significant growth opportunities in the enterprise hardware systems space,” a spokesLenovo said.

 

Infosys to hire “stupid” Americans

Posted on November 6, 2014 by - News

jeff-daniels-says-dumb-and-dumber-sequel-still-on-aiming-for-summer-2013-startIndian outsourcer Infosys plans to hire over 2,100 Americans as part of its programme to scale up its global presence and boost key work areas like client relationship management and consulting.

The only problem is that it has been accused of thinking that Americans are stupid and selecting Indian employees over Americans in the past.

Like most rivals, India’s second biggest IT services provider gets the major chunk of its business from clients in the United States, but relies on its Indian to provide the staff.

Infosys said the hiring will include up to 300 management and technology graduates who will work across multiple technology domains including digital, big data, analytics and cloud.

Up to 180 graduates will be recruited into the Infosys consulting practice in the United States, the company said.

Chief Executive Vishal Sikka, who is based in the United States, has said he wants to revive growth through automation and artificial intelligence as clients modernise their technologies.

Last year Infosys was accused of discrimination against “stupid Americans” and is currently facing a class action lawsuit.  The lawsuit was filed by VMware specialist Brenda Koehler in the U.S. District Court in Eastern Wisconsin who claimed that Infosys has been abusing the visa system and actively discriminates against hiring American workers for staff positions.

Her complaint followed another by Jay Palmer, a former staff of Infosys who failed in his legal action against the firm.  He claimed he was called a “stupid American” repeatedly. During a board meeting, he saw other staff wrote “No Americans/Christians.”

Qualcomm has China crisis

Posted on November 6, 2014 by - News

china-syndrome-one-sheet1Qualcomm is facing a little trouble in Big China as it is starting to look like its antitrust investigation is going pear shaped. Meanwhile problems collecting royalties could harm its business in China next year.

To make matters worse it is facing similar investigations in the United States and Europe.

Qualcomm should be making a large profit in China. The country is expanding high-speed 4G network is driving demand for smartphones with leading-edge technology.

But it looks like Qualcomm could face a fine of more than $1 billion in China as a result of the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) investigation, and the company could be forced to make concessions that would hurt its highly profitable business of charging royalties on phones that use its patents.

Qualcomm admitted that it faces a new probe by the European Commission about rebates and other financial incentives in the sale of its chips. Another preliminary investigation by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission concerns a potential breach of licensing terms.

Qualcomm President Derek Aberle said that his company was co-operating with the Chinese to come up with potential ways to resolve the problem.

Qualcomm has also been struggling to collect licensing revenue from some device makers in China, including local manufacturers the US chipmaker has done little or no business with in the past.

But the fear is that concessions on royalties that Qualcomm is forced to make in China could spread to manufacturers in other countries.

Qualcomm said it was difficult to predict the outcome of the U.S. and European investigations.

The European probe is separate from a four-year-old complaint to the European Commission from a subsidiary of Nvidia over alleged patent-related incentives and exclusionary pricing by Qualcomm.

Qualcomm forecast revenue for fiscal 2015 of between $26.8 billion and $28.8 billion. Analysts on average expected $28.91 billion.

The chipmaker reported revenue of $6.69 billion for its fiscal fourth quarter, ended Sept. 28, up 3 percent from the year-ago period. Analysts on average had expected $7.016 billion.

Qualcomm posted fourth-quarter net income of $1.89 billion, up 26 percent from a year ago.

Apple gear plagued with malware

Posted on November 6, 2014 by - News

giant bugPalo Alto Networks has discovered a new family of malware that can infect Apple desktop and mobile operating systems.

For a while now, Jobs’ Mob has made much of the fact it is “super secure” even while its gear is turned over in seconds at hacker conferences.  But now the hardware is becoming more popular it is clear that hackers are starting to write code that can disable anything that Apple comes up with.

The “WireLurker” malware can install third-party applications on regular, non-jailbroken iOS devices and hop from infected Macs onto iPhones through USB connector-cables.

Ryan Olson, intelligence director for the company’s Unit 42 division said that had seen indications that the attackers were Chinese. The malware originated from a Chinese third-party apps store and appeared to have mostly affected users within the country.

The malware spread through infected apps uploaded to the apps store that were in turn downloaded onto Mac computers. This is bad news for Apple which always claims that its store is closely vetted in comparison to the Google operation.

According to the company, more than 400 such infected apps had been downloaded over 350,000 times so far.

So far, there is no evidence that the attackers had made off with anything more sensitive than messaging IDs and contacts from users’ address books. But then again what sort of information would an Apple user have?  There cannot be many Chinese spooks who want a Coldplay or U2 collection. As far as companies are concerned,

Apple was told about the bug two weeks ago and has not done anything.  Once WireLurker gets on an iPhone, it can go on to infect existing apps on the device, somewhat akin to how a traditional virus infects computer software programs. Olson said it was the first time he had seen it in action. “It’s the first time we’ve seen anyone doing it in the wild,” he added.