A shaggy iPhone developer found out that he can drive up the rankings of his crappy iPhone apps in the 'Books' category of App Store by hacking hundreds of iTunes accounts (It seems that all of these hacked accounts were from US) and buy his own apps through the hacked accounts. There are several iTunes account holders reporting that someone just purchased crappy apps from their accounts. This is the first time such a case of iTunes account hacking has surfaced and it's not yet clear how the app developer managed to hack so many account especially when iTunes is believed to be a secure platform.

If you have an iTunes account then take precautionary measures right now and remove all your bank and credit card information before it's too late.

The developer of Self Help Classics, which has remained in the top 10 paid apps list for 1.5 years in the Books category of App Store has investigated the whole issue and found out that:

41 out of the total 50 list of top paid apps in the Books category are some strange Vietnamese comic book apps. Here's a still of the top 50 paid apps list of AppStore's Books category. You can clearly see that even the names of these apps are illegible:



(The apps in the red boundary are all released on the same date i.e. 16th April and they all managed to reach the top 50)

There have been reports of up to $300+ of apps being bought from the hacked App Store accounts. Most of these accounts are US based but there are also some UK App Store accounts that are also ripped off. Here’s an account of people who shared their stories:

So much so that there are people actually congratulating each other for not getting hacked! It seems that all this hacking activity took place over an extended period of time (1 month maybe) but it reached climax over this weekend.

Let us know if your account has also being hacked or you see any app purchases which you never authorized?