These iPhone apps are dangerous, you must remove them as soon as possible

© Unsplash/Rami Al-zayat

Apple may add new levels of security every year, but a few developers still manage to slip through the cracks. In a recent report, cybersecurity firm Kaspersky lists the apps ComeCome, ChatAi, WeTink, and AnyGPT as vulnerable.

They have reportedly been infected with a computer virus since March 2024. The report explains that this malware was capable of stealing images from phone galleries in the hopes of finding recovery phrases to access cryptocurrency wallets and steal funds.

These applications, although little known in France, are available on the App Store and the Google Play Store and used by millions of people around the world. The presence of this malware was nevertheless impossible for users to detect, because the infected applications behaved quite naturally.

Analysts Sergey Puzan and Dmitry Kalinin, who have just released their conclusions on this software, called SparkCat, assure that this virus is very dangerous. It is notably capable of recovering personal data in a photo gallery, such as passwords or recovery phrases.

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Another useful precaution is that it is advisable not to store such information in your photo gallery. The two analysts instead ask that we use secure password managers. There are a number of them on the web, and here is our selection of the most efficient ones.

Applications to be uninstalled urgently

Given the risk involved, the two cybersecurity experts are asking that the applications mentioned above be simply and purely deleted from your phone. In total, the malware has been activated nearly 242,000 times since it was released into the wild last March.

While this discovery does not yet allow us to find a culprit, it does cast opprobrium on China. Indeed, the two cybersecurity researchers discovered comments and error messages written in Chinese, suggesting that the creator(s) of this virus were Chinese speakers.

For now, Apple and Google, which still offer these applications in their respective stores, have not yet spoken out. The two companies were clearly unaware of the presence of a virus in their Store. It remains to be seen how the latter managed to slip under the radar and detection software of Google and Apple. A common flaw between the two application stores would be a godsend for cybercriminals.

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