Mac App Store cracked within hours of launch

Apple's App Store for OSX, released yesterday evening, has seemingly fallen prey to piracy within less than 24 hours.

Crackers have devised a method of replacing signature files on paid applications with those of free ones, enabling pirated versions to be installed without the App Store complaining.

Another method known as 'Kickback' has been announced by Hackulous, a collective behind some of the more notorious iOS piracy tools.

This will apparently not be released until at least February, with Hackulous member 'Dissident' telling P2P news site TorrentFreak that "We're not going to release Kickback until well after the store's been established, well after developers have gotten their applications up. We don't want to devalue applications and frustrate developers."

The tool would not be made available until the group felt that the App Store "has a lot of crap in it", he claimed. It remains to be seen whether the revelation of the signature files method will prompt an earlier release of Kickback.