Consumer Affairs Victoria deletes App Store malware claim
Consumer Affairs Victoria (CAV) has deleted a page on which it alleged Apple’s App Store contains “counterfeit or ‘cloned’ apps” that “look like real apps but don’t have the same kind of security as those made by established software programmers” and “can expose personal data to malware or predatory, virus-like software.”
The Register yesterday pointed out to CAV that the claim was rather hard to sustain and asked Apple what it thought of the claim.
“This is not something that has come from Apple,” Apple Australia PR person Fiona Martin told El Reg in a voicemail, the arrival of which was rather celebrated as the fruity company generally fails to reply to this organ’s inquiries. We’re also left off invitation lists to events in the USA. Martin suggested we ask Consumer Affairs Victoria (CAV) to explain itself, and we did.
CAV’s response offered a link to this New York Times article http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/16/technology/pressure-on-apple-builds-over-app-store-fraud.html?_r=2pagewantead=all that details account fraud but makes no allegations about counterfeit or cloned apps. A CAV spokesperson did offer anodyne advice to this effect:
Consumer Affairs Victoria reminds consumers to always remain vigilant in the online environment and provides advice when concerns are raised in the public domain about potential consumer detriment.
Even when using trusted service providers, it is important that consumers take all reasonable steps to prevent being scammed.
But the agency did not provide any evidence for its claim the App Store contains data-sucking counterfeit apps and has since removed the page, which now produces a neat 404 error. If you want to view what was online yesterday, we took a screen grab you can view here.
As soon as CAV tells us why they did so, we’ll let you know. reg
Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/20/au_app_store_malware_claims/