Sébastien Page

After issuing a somewhat weak statement about the App Store hacking situation, Apple is now blatantly lying to our face and downplaying what seems to be a massive criminal activity.

Apple recently told Dayton Morris that around 400 or so iTunes users were impacted by the fraud, which, considering there are over 150 million iTunes users, only represents 0.0003% of them.

Oh great, they seem to have this under control, you might think. Wrong, and it doesn't take a genius to figure it out. Here is why...

Thuat Nguyen, the developer who was first caught taking advantage of the the iTunes App Store got 41 of his applications rank in the top 50 of the book category. Now tell me, how can 400 iTunes accounts boost an app sales all the way up to the top 50? Right, they can't. You need muh more purchases than that to rank at the top of your category. Each app needs to be downloaded thousands of times on a period of time to rank that well.

Let's use conservative numbers and assume that to rank at the top of the Books category you need 1,000 downloads for 30 days. So each app would need to be downloaded 30,000 times (1,000 downloads x 30 days) in order to take the top spot because one account cannot buy the same app over and over again.

All the sudden, we are far from the 400 accounts Apple claims were impacted by the fraud. I might not be exactly right about these numbers, but I'm sure I'm not too far from the truth.

Apple impassiveness has been pretty flagrant lately and I'm not really sure the "no-talk policy" Apple has been maintaining for years now is a good things for both the company and its customers.

Thoughts?

Over the weekend, reports started showing up revealing the iTunes App Store had been hacked. The hack seemed to be on 2 levels. Someone hacked into people's iTunes account and purchased applications without their consent. The goal was to buy a bunch of apps from a developer named Thuat Nguyen in order to help his apps rank in the top of their category.

Apple kinda fixed it by removing Thuat Nguyen's apps from the App Store. Today the company issued an official statement:

The developer Thuat Nguyen and his apps were removed from the App Store for violating the developer Program License Agreement, including fraudulent purchase patterns.

Developers do not receive any iTunes confidential customer data when an app is downloaded.

If your credit card or iTunes password is stolen and used on iTunes we recommend that you contact your financial institution and inquire about canceling the card and issuing a chargeback for any unauthorized transactions. We also recommend that you change your iTunes account password immediately. For more information on best practices for password security visit http://www.apple.com/support/itunes.

Did Apple actually fix anything? Not really, and that's what bothering me here. Apple doesn't admit being responsible for people hacking into your account. Basically Apple is saying that you're on your own and if you have a problem you should get in touch with your credit company.

Apple's apathy has been pretty obvious lately. If you thought Apple cared about you as a customer, the way they handled the iPhone antenna issue and these App Store hacks might make you change your mind.