(Image courtesy of MacRumors)

Over the Fourth of July holiday weekend here in the U.S., reports broke out that Apple’s App Store had been hacked by a rogue developer who figured out how to cheat the system and artificially drive up sales of their e-books. Turns out, the whole thing may have been much ado about very little.

MacRumors is reporting that the App Store “hacking” reported on Sunday by TheNextWeb -- which quickly spread some degree of panic across Twitter and several tech blogs -- is not really quite what it seems at first glance. The initial report claimed that “a rogue developer had gamed the system by artificially driving sales to their e-books.” In this case, a flood of “poorly coded Vietnamese-based books” had shot to the App Store’s Top Books Paid Software ranks, which was quickly spotted and immediately called into suspicion by competing developers.

The disturbing part of this issue came when at least a couple of reviews posted for one of the books made the claim that “at least two customers had their iTunes accounts compromised to purchase the books,” which trigged suspicion that the e-book developer had somehow hacked the accounts in an effort to raise his sales ranking. That report led to “headlines suggesting that everyone’s iTunes account was suddenly vulnerable to a coordinated attack,” which was clearly not the case.

Apple moved quickly to remove the suspect e-books,  but MacRumors is quick to note that the App Store Book category -- which is separate from its own iBookstore featured within iBooks -- is “one of the lowest trafficked categories in the App Store.” That means that even a small bump in daily sales would push one or more titles into the Top 50 ranking, unlike other categories like Games which have thousands of titles available.

MacRumors claims that “even if every sale was based on a compromised account, the actual number of accounts involved are minuscule compared to the 100 million active iTunes accounts.” That said, iTunes account holders are encouraged to check their purchase history for any suspect activity, and as a precautionary measure, it’s a good idea to change your password, avoiding “easy to guess passwords and shared passwords across multiple accounts.”

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