Categories: Hacking

Hacked BigBoss, the biggest Cydia’s repository

The BigBoss app repository, the default package store for Cydia application, has been hacked by a group of hackers which named itself “Kim Jong-Cracks”.

The BigBoss repository, one of the biggest and most popular repositories for jailbreak tweaks in Cydia, has suffered a major data breach. Cydia is an application very popular within the community of iOS Apple users, it is the jailbreaker’s App Store alternative for iOS. The unofficial store contains thousands of apps, themes, and many other downloads. Using Cydia iOs users can find and install applications on their jailbroken iOS Apple devices, the majority of the software in the store are available for free.

The BigBoss repository is the default repository for iOS devices jailbroken with Cydia, it is a privileged target for cybercriminals.

A group of hackers which name itself “Kim Jong-Cracks” gained the access to all packages present in the BigBoss repository and made them available through their own repository. As a proof to the hack, the groups made the deb index and BigBoss database available for download, which includes the log file reporting packages and their MD5.

“The other post more than likely broke rule 1 because it linked the site directly. To anyone that didn’t see the post the BigBoss repo was (supposedly) hacked by either an individual or group of people and they have a repo out there with all of BigBoss’s packages (paid and free). Their proof.log shows that they have the original MD5 sums,” the news of the hack was spread through Reddit post.

The The hackers have made available all the applications on their website dubbed ripBigBoss, the site seems to include the entire collection of apps, nearly 13,954, available in BigBoss packages … all for free.

I’m not linking to the ripBigBoss website to avoid diffusion of malware that the manager could serve trough the site. At the time I was writing BitDefender AV is making it as infected website.

“The website and companion repo are using Saurik’s recent “Competition vs Community” as a motivation for their acts,” iDownloadBlog reports, but security experts are skeptical. I strongly suggest you to avoid the ripBigBoss repo, despite Kim Jong-Cracks announced that all the apps published are not infected. I remind you that it is quite easy for hackers to trojanize legitimate applications initially present in the BigBoss store.

To discourage Cydia users to refer BigBoss repository, Kim Jong-Cracks claims to have injected those free packages with malware. Jay Freeman, also known as as Saurik, the creator of Cydia, believes that the menaces of the group are not true. Saurik has augmented his thesis saying that he has verified that the content on BigBoss did not change from the analysis of the index of all historical changes to the repository.

“This article mentions malware being potentially injected into the BigBoss repository; we do not believe this to be the case, Saurik said in a statement to iDB. “Packages in Cydia repositories are cryptographically verified from the repository package index. I have an index of all historic changes to the package indices for default repositories, and have verified that the content on BigBoss did not change in ways that the repository administrators did not expect.”

Anyway, I strongly suggest you to avoid installing or updating any jailbreak tweak from the BigBoss repository in this phase neither from ripBigBoss repository.

Pierluigi Paganini

Security Affairs – (cydia, BigBoss)

Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.