Using Man-in-the-middle attacks, Israeli security personnel have discovered an attack method for victimizing iPhone and iPad applications.

Skycure's CTO Yair Amit said "We identified a very large number of applications that are vulnerable to this problem."

"Usually we go through responsible disclosure and contact specific vendors of programs, solve it, then talk about it. In this case it's an interesting challenge in that there's a huge amount of applications, too many to have an organized disclosure route, so we give developers the information they need to fix the applications."

The malware dubbed the HTTP Request Hijacking, basically works by exploiting weaknesses in the way the apps communicate with backend servers provided by their developers or indeed any websites.

Data being fetched from the backend server will be subverted to the attackers server where it will gather data from the app.

It is relatively simple to fix the problem. a source code fix, posted by the company, will be dropped into applications quickly by developers.