We covered iXintpwn/YJSNPI in a previous blog post and looked into how it renders an iOS device unresponsive by overflowing it with icons. This threat comes in the form of an unsigned profile that crashes the standard application that manages the iOS home screen when installed. The malicious profile also exploits certain features to make iXintpwn/YJSNPI more difficult to uninstall.

We recently discovered a new variant of iXintpwn/YJSNPI (detected by Trend Micro as IOS_YJSNPI.A) that uses a signed profile to conduct different attacks compared to its predecessor. IOS_YJSNPI.A is extracted from either of the two app stores—hxxp://m[.]3454[.]com and hxxp://m[.]973[.]com. Based on our analysis, this new variant’s main purpose is not to damage users’ operating systems, but to lure users into downloading repackaged apps.