Searching for ‘antivirus’ now only shows games or Find My iPhone-esque apps.
Apple has seemingly decided to crack down on antivirus and antimalware apps, removing them from the App Store. Although there has been no official statement from Apple on a policy change, Apple’s loose guidelines allow them to pull pretty much anything at any time, particularly something like antivirus which has questionable utility within the sandboxed iOS environment of iPhones and iPads.
One casualty of the removal is Intego’s VirusBarrier, which claims that this takedown was not specific to its product with Apple deciding the entire category of antivirus products is now off-limits.
Searching for ‘antivirus’ in the App Store still returns many results. However, under inspection, all of the related apps we checked were not actually anti-virus products. Instead they were either games or apps replicating ‘Find My iPhone’ features under the branding of ‘mobile security’.
Obviously, App Store search is not the most comprehensive test … but some number of antivirus apps have definitely been culled, if not all. For example, ‘Anti-Virus Detective’ is no longer available although it is unclear exactly when this year the app was removed; the app was last listed in December. A number of other previously available apps with a similar description are no longer available either.
9to5Mac has reached out to Apple for comment to clarify the situation.
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You can’t get a virus on your iPhone correct? So these seem like scams for the uninformed.
Yeah, pretty much. Some of the apps would (at least claim to) scan your email accounts for bad attachments that contained viruses for Windows PC’s. The closest thing to a virus you get on iOS is a jailbreak.
Are you fucking dumb?
A jailbreak is not a virus at all. What makes you think it is?
Great reporting, Benjamin. Ignore the jerks with the potty mouths who do not get the point.
Please don’t spread misinformation. Jailbreak is not equal to a virus. Either explain it fully, or don’t say anything at all.
A virus is like a jailbreak in the sense that they open up system exploits when present which both have the potential to be used for nefarious purposes. Crucially, though, jailbreaks require physical access to the device — iOS devices cannot be remotely jailbroken. A remote jailbreak is almost identical to what most people would consider a ‘virus’ or ‘malware’.
Jailbreak.Me was a rare instance where someone found a way to do exactly that — install a jailbreak by having the user navigate to a URL. Physical device access was not required. This is one of the most serious breaches of iOS security there has ever been.
Dear on dear.
There is an awful lot of rubbish on the web and statements like the above are just stupid. No offense Benjamin but this is rubbish.
Mobile phones are the wild west at the moment for security. They are like Windows PC’s ten years ago with very little security at the moment.
IOS is better then Android but that is not saying much.
“97% of the top 100 paid Android apps and 87% of IOS have been hacked.
Reference: Arxan Info Security report.
https://www.arxan.com/resources/state-of-application-security
There are a few products out there. The largest threat is 0 day and Malware.
p.s. A Jailbreak has nothing to do with a virus, malware or 0 day vulnerability.
It’s a jailbreak. That’s it. However, Jail broken phones are more vulnerable.
Non Jail broken phones are hacked using Enterprise provisioning.
They are still hackable.
Actually, there is at least one known virus for your iPhone. Fortunately Apple does eventually patch the exploits that makes those viruses work. This is similar to why PCs and Macs gets updates, expect much more infrequently. PC patches are released once a month (many times multiple times in the same month if there is a severe bug) whereas iOS updates come every few month. Although that’s been changing and Apple has been increasing their update rates lately.
In terms of viruses, the one iPhone virus so far have been relatively benign or not so sophisticated, so it’s not the end of the world. But it doesn’t mean there wouldn’t be any bad ones in the future.
This one real world example is the unflod.dylib virus. If you google it you’ll get a lot of talk about jailbreaks, but it doesn’t mean only jailbroken iPhone were vulnerable. The reason for that is that there are vulnerabilities in iOS that allows for arbitrary code execution outside of Apple’s walled garden. So it’s entirely possible for a virus programmer to exploit these vulnerabilities to load a virus into a not jailbroken iPhone. In fact, in certain iOS versions, it was possible to execute arbitrary code by visiting a particularly crafted website. So it would have been possible to have a malicious executable installed on your iPhone when you accidentally visit the website.
So in short, you can get a virus, but not many has been written. Although iOS anti-virus apps in the App store probably don’t do anything since iOS wouldn’t let you run real-time scans since Apple wouldn’t approve those type of apps.
Unflod.dylib is not a virus, it’s a malware and it does not replicate. Being a malware it is installed by the user disguised as a normal app, it’s not using any vulnerability to install/replicate itself, and this is the reason it only appears on jailbroken devices where you can install every kind of app.
Why would they even let these apps in in the first place? Seems like shoddy review process to me.
Probably the apps dont break any specific rules, and the review process sided on letting it through. Apple is likely updating rules to restrict any type of anti-virus software in general.
I don’t know the wording, but I’m pretty sure they have a rule about “non-functional” apps. If they *aren’t* ruling out non-functional apps then they are just complete idiots.
IMO the App store is a useless sh*t-fest where you can’t find anything anyway. A few simple rules and keeping to them would clean it up in no time, but of course there is no reason for them to do that, when the high number of apps in the store is one of their key selling points, regardless of the fact that most of them are shite.
On a side note, it just got me thinking – if they removed all the BS apps from the Windows Store, I don’t think there’d be anything in there at all that everyone hasn’t already downloaded and tried.
Are there any specific viruses for OSX? how does all that work in that kind of systems? I have been a Gentoo Linux User for over a decade so I know how it works on Linux Systems but I just got my first Mac a few days ago (actually still waiting for delivery) So I was wondering how similar to Linux it was regarding viruses, malware and that sort of stuff, sorry about my english, Im from Uruguay :D
Your English is better than a lot of native speakers’ on here. :)
I never run anti-virus on a Mac (13+ years now), and have never had a problem. Don’t install anything from your email that you don’t specifically know what it is, and don’t give permission to the system to install anything you aren’t expecting, and you’ll be fine.
You’ll find using a Mac is a treat.
Thanks.
I know I will :D I do love all Apple Products, the thing is that here they cost about 70% more than in the US, its kind of prohibitive for us.
I guess It´ll be pretty much like Linux then in terms of Viruses, thats good :D
There are no viruses on OS X and no reason to run a virus checker for the most part. Social engineering is the only real threat. Browser hijacks and Word macro attacks can happen but they don’t do any damage and are easily fixed by a reset.
There was a couple a while back, which were some problems with Java and Adobe Flash, but they have been fixed a while back. Any malware for Macs typically don’t get that widespread and since there aren’t that many in the first place, they get a lot of publicity very quickly. For Windows and Android, there are so many, it’s just normal and they don’t get much media attention.
F-Secure Labs has white papers on known malware for Mobile Devices and Desktop OS’s and they release them quarterly or every so often so you can always check with places like F-Secure Labs or others that track any known malware floating around.
The best thing to do is to use VPN, don’t go to known hacker sites, don’t go to porno sites, be careful about what attachment files you open in your email and what software you get. Try to stay away from shareware if you don’t know much about the company, a lot of shareware is just badly written crap because since they aren’t getting any money from it, they don’t update it when new OSs come out and they are more of a hobby and they simply don’t always do things properly. Some of them are OK, but that’s rare.
Those weren’t viruses though and you do everyone a disservice by not differentiating between actual viruses and malware.
If you like Linux, will love homebrew.
Don’t forget get xCode build tools =D
Viruses are impossible on OS X. As evident by 14 years of hackers and anti-virus corporations hammering against the software trying to make something work, and failing. From 2001 to 2015 there have been zero actual, factual viruses for OS X in the wild.
OS X is not similar to Linux. Both OS X and Linux are based on UNIX, but OS X is written differently. So differently that Linux apps have to run in emulation under OS X. Specifically, the compartmentalized nature of OS X absolutely refuses to allow code to run itself at the system level without a human’s permission. Let alone replicate and transmit itself to other machines.
Malware, by nature, is possible because users can let something in without realizing what it is. But again, it can’t start moving across a network or the internet to get to other machines without someone’s help.
Just be smart. Don’t download or run anything that looks shady, don’t give apps permission for things unless you know why, run encryption whenever and wherever possible. Don’t install Flash or Java unless you absolutely have to. Never install Silverlight. Just don’t. And if you must use those things, make sure you keep them up to date at all times. Enjoy your new Mac.
Technically viruses are a subset of malware. All viruses are malware, but not all malware are viruses. Viruses are simply a type of malware – nothing more.
However, in the consumer space, the term “virus” is synonymous with “malware”, for obvious reasons of marketing and simplicity.
In your world, any product labeled/named as an “Antivirus” (as opposed to “Antimalware”) product only checks for/removes “viruses”, and not any other malware type.
Apparently Kaspersky Antivirus 2015 has very little to do.
In reality, those products scan for and remove a much broader range of malware of course, since its understood that the term “virus” is synonymous with “malware”
Additionally, “technical” viruses (the subset of malware) have become rarer overall relative to the broad category of malware on all platforms.
A compromised install/device is a compromised install/device, regardless of how the compromising took place, or what you call it.
Does OSX have security vulnerabilities? Yes
http://www.securityfocus.com/bid
https://cve.mitre.org/find/index.html
Go there, search for OSX/iOS/Apple, them come back and insist on the supposed security advantage of OSX/iOS
Have these vulnerabilities been exploited? Yes
http://www.macworld.com/article/2841965/swedish-hacker-finds-serious-vulnerability-in-os-x-yosemite.html
https://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-jp-08/bh-jp-08-Miller/BlackHat-Japan-08-Miller-Hacking-OSX.pdf
Does malware exist for OS X? Yes
http://www.welivesecurity.com/2014/03/21/10-years-of-mac-os-x-malware/
http://www.macrumors.com/2014/12/09/os-x-malware-kaspersky/
“The study tracked nearly 1500 new malware programs targeting OS X over the past year, 200 more than in the previous year.”
Trying to make a silly argument about the supposed security superiority of OSX based upon a false distinction between “virus” and “malware” is painful at best.
Perhaps its time to turn off that reality distortion field and see reality for what it is – you might actually have a much better chance of securing your Apple software-based devices from attack and exploitation.
Security-Through-Absurdity doesn’t work.
@Hof Brau says “Security-Through-Absurdity doesn’t work”. and neither does your load of crap posted above. To paraphrase, you’re saying humans get sick, and some times it’s a virus, and sometimes it’s just getting sick. Home humans in the world are known for not getting sick as easy as other humans, then again, all humans get sick. Some get sick with virus, and some with bacertia, but to think you’ll never get sick…. blah blah blah blah Your load of crap above makes me gag.
VirusBarrier iOS doesn’t scan the iPhone itself for viruses, and neither the app or the application description made any such claims. The app scans email attachments for malware and includes a cloud storage scanner (e.g. scanning Dropbox for malware) to close the security loophole.
if that is the case, then it is very misleading to call it “VIRUSbarrier” is it not? dropbox might have security holes, but, not iCloud. I must restate, the over sensationalized media coverage of celebrity pics being accessed was not due to security holes, but, due to a crappy password, and, likely, knowledge of that password.
Rename the app HolePlugger and resubmit. :D
Nice to see Apple protecting consumers from these scam apps.
The haters will say Apple is just protecting their image, but that doesn’t make sense since these apps wouldn’t make any news if Apple just left them there!
The other issue is getting a PC virus which may not affect OS X, but you don’t want to pass it on to others. That’s where I see the real benefit.
Definitely don’t use more than one that will definitely create false alarms.
I’ve been using ESET and it’s not that bad, plus it has other things that you can do with it other than just virus scanning.
Because of the sandboxing technology, on iOS you’re actually able to inspect nothing with these apps, since they only see their own files.
And sorry to reply again, I just forgot one more point. The sandboxing is also enforced for the OS X AppStore as far as I know, so on the AppStore you should probably not be able to find functioning virus scanners.
Après moi, le déluge.
I depended upon Norton and McAfee and that app with the white death face, and because of them, I never had a virus or trojan horse problem with my IOS devices.
Now, all I’ve got for protection is the NSA.
You shouldn’t use more than one on OS X or iOS. They can sometimes cause false alarms. I tried that once and I found out the hard way. Just stick with one or the other.
Antivirus is for Android. The end.
With all these ads redirecting to the App Store I’m sure it causes people to go looking for these apps. Get rid of them and maybe the redirecting might stop.
The next round will be probably the replication of ‘Find My iPhone’ feature as app submission guidelines suggest you should not duplicate the operating system’s functionality.
The app store and app review process is completely broken. It’s need an urgent fixing and transparency. It’s unfortunate that so many people, like myself, can build and publish apps and then the next day they are gone (hasn’t happened to me yet, but I’ve had a few instances that made me feel uneasy). I wish there would be more reporting on the App Store Review Process and how Apple can ruin the lives of developers in an instance.
Avira mobile security is still available at least here in Europe.
One of the better decisions that Apple had taken in the last couple of months. It was very much annoying as a user to get those apps in the app store which is of very less productivity. The replicas of ‘Find my iPhone’ feature were too much for an user who opted for an anti-virus. Good move.
TrendMicro, who has been in the business for 20+ years, HAS ACTUALLY FOUND VIRUSes / spyware, espionage apps. in the iOS. They currently have an anti-virus app in the Apple app store as of today: Oct 13, 2015
http://blog.trendmicro.com/trendlabs-security-intelligence/pawn-storm-update-ios-espionage-app-found/
TrendMicro, who has been in the business for 20+ years, currently has an antivirus app as of Oct. 13, 2015. See below
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/trend-micro-mobile-security/id630442428?mt=8