Just saw an article about the vicious malware that is Wirelurker. In short, Wirelurker can attack even non-jailbroken iOS devices, and has great potential to turn these wonderful iOS devices into dumb bots:
Once WireLurker is on your iPhone or iPad, it appears to do a number of weird and wonderful things. If you’re not jailbroken, WireLurker simply installs/side-loads more apps from the iTunes App Store. If you’re jailbroken, it does a lot more, including infecting/trojanizing existing apps on your iOS device and backing them up to your Mac. In both cases, WireLurker constantly pings a central command server, which can trigger a payload update, or instruct WireLurker to harvest and transmit sensitive details from your device.
What can be done to safeguard against this heinous software?
Best Answer
Do not download third-party apps from untrusted sources.
In System Preferences, Set:
Security & Privacy --> General --> Allow apps downloaded from: to either
Mac App Store or Mac App Store and identified developers
So far it seems this is only transferable from a computer to device over a usb to iTunes connection, which means the computer must be infected with one of these third party apps. Also seems pretty limited to China and its third party app store for now.
Digital Trends Article.
PaloAlto Networks Article