Baddies' brilliant plan to get mobile malware whitelisted: Bribery

Bribery ? Ah, in China. Move along.

That path is rather well-trodden if I'm not mistaken.

The only newsworthy part about it is that they got caught which, given that we're talking about malware, is not all that surprising since legitimate users would logically complain about an app that does dodgy things and that complaint would be handled by people other than the guy (or two) responsible for getting it on the store in the first place.

So it was kind of a stupid idea in the first place ; the kind of idea a low-level hacker incapable of defeating the AV would think of. Then again, it takes real smarts to defeat a proper AV system these days (when they're not shooting themselves in the foot that is), so I guess I'm not throwing him the book, just a handful of gravel.

Trust us

You can trust us to only feed you good games and utilities. You can trust your transactions through our apps because you trust us.

Without trust we are nothing, therefore we are trustworthy. Don't check the links in the chain now.

another reason not to use app stores

Re: So it was kind of a stupid idea in the first place

That doesn't follow - as long as they made more in the interim than it cost them then it was worth it.

Moreover, how many infected users will never learn of it because they don't read news reports about this kind of thing, thus making for a longer-term payoff?

I never thought I'd have anything positive to say about app-stores, but at least the model means that infection-rates will be lower than when people can simply 'share' their apps with their friends.