Apple Thoughts: Mac App Store Hacked

"Crude instructions have started showing up online with ways to circumvent Apples Mac App store receipt validation. By simply copying receipt and info.plist data from a free app and pasting it into a paid app, you can run apps copied from friends computers or bittorrent. I myself have a copy of a paid app (not angry birds, but one with stronger protection) running on my system that was purchased by a friend. This is a massive failure in the implementation of Apples receipt system."

It has been widely reported that the App Store had been hacked, and it was true in limited cases. The hack has to do with "receipt validation." Some developers aren't properly checking against the receipts, and this allowed people to run apps on their machine that hadn't been purchased as long as they had a valid receipt from another application. According to this article on Macworld, the hack isn't that big a deal, and it's up to the developers to change their applications to properly implement receipt validation.