I suppose this is a good argument for why Apple wants to have control of the apps that people have access to on the App Store. Researchers got almost 8,000 people to install an app and while they have created a “malicious version of the app capable of harvesting data, posting fake updates on social networking sites and sending spam,” they haven’t published it. Of course, the only iPhones affected by this problem are jailbroken devices that install apps from Cydia or other similar service.

Smartphone app botnet experiment blows up a storm [The Register]