The MacWorld article says the pretty much same thing I did:
The iOS platform has seen a number of attacks that fit the first definition, when attackers have inserted malicious code into respectable apps or hijacked the developer tool used to create them. And although compromised apps should be caught at the App Store's approval stage, those who have jailbroken their devices can install apps from other sources and may inadvertently install something dangerous.
In either case, however, the isolated sandbox nature of iOS should prevent the malware attack from getting access to other applications (in order to spread itself) or to the underlying operating system.
In other words, unless the phone has been jailbroken, you don't have a virus. And, if you read the complete article, they are mostly pointing out that the problem is unlikely to be a virus.
I'm guessing you didn't actually read the LifeWire article as it says this:
If you see a message on your iPad saying you have a virus, don't panic. There are no known viruses that target the iPad. In fact, a virus may never exist for the iPad. In a technical sense, a virus is a piece of code that replicates itself by creating a copy within another piece of software on your computer. But unlike PCs that have a very open file system, iOS doesn't allow one app direct access to the files of another app, preventing any would-be virus from replicating.
As for other types of malware, unless you jailbreak your iOS device and sideload apps of questionable provenance, the likelihood of acquiring things is so small as to be way down the list of things to look at while troubleshooting. Either the OP has a bad digitizer or they have a bad cable (as a subsequent poster suggested).
