Apple has removed seventeen apps developed by a Gujarat-based developer from the App Store after suspecting them to be infected with clickware meant to increase advertising revenue. Believed to have been first reported by cyber security company, Wandera, the apps were published on the App Store by AppAspect Technologies, but are no longer available for download.
On an official blog post, Wandera said: “The Clicker Trojan module discovered in this group of applications is designed to carry out ad fraud-related tasks in the background, such as continuously opening web pages or clicking links without any user interaction … (It is a) class of malware that performs ad-fraud by making frequent connections to ad networks or websites in order to artificially inflate visitor counts or to generate revenue on a pay-per-click basis”.
