Why Apple's "walled garden" is a good idea
Many developers and users of Apple's iOS devices bemoan the "walled garden" of the App Store approval process, but it appears that the company's measures have prevented mass data theft from iPhones, and iPads.
At the Black Hat security conference being held in Las Vegas this week, mobile security firm Lookout announced that an app distributed in Google's Android Market had collected private information from millions of users, then forwarded it to servers in China. Worse than that, the exact number of affected users isn't known, since the Android Market doesn't provide precise data. Estimates are that the app was downloaded anywhere from 1.1 million to 4.6 million times.
The app appeared to simply load free custom background wallpapers, but in fact collected a user's browsing history, text messages, the SIM card number, and even voice mail passwords, and then sent the data to a web site in Shenzen, China.
