Worm attack bites at Apple iPhone

Father Ted · 10 Nov 2009 at 11:04

Worm attack bites at Apple iPhone

The worm changes the wallpaper of the phone
The first worm to infect the Apple iPhone has been discovered spreading "in the wild" in Australia.
The self-propagating program changes the phone's wallpaper to a picture of 80s singer Rick Astley with the message "ikee is never going to give you up".
The worm, known as ikee, only affects "jail-broken" phones, where a user has removed Apple's protection mechanisms to allow the phone to run any software.
Experts say the worm is not harmful but more malicious variants could follow.
"The creator of the worm has released full source code of the four existing variants of this worm," wrote Mikko Hypponen of security firm F-secure.
"This means that there will quickly be more variants, and they might have nastier payload than just changing your wallpaper."

Story: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8349905.stm

LordSplodge · 10 Nov 2009 at 11:06

The worm, known as ikee, only affects "jail-broken" phones

Hmmmm...

Caseh · 12 Nov 2009 at 03:30

That is by far the best worm I have ever heard of!

Hotwired · 12 Nov 2009 at 03:57

Post here when you get rickrolled on your iphone

Kainz · 12 Nov 2009 at 06:45

The general idea of the worm is rather old though and anyone 'doing' their phone should have enough brains to change the default password in the first place. Either that or don't install SSH. The media are enjoying reporting this 'new' news when it is ancient.

On the otherhand Rick Astley is a legend

Tom84 · 12 Nov 2009 at 10:00

Read about this the other day, part of me wishes I had a spare iPhone that I could jailbreak just to get infected

RobH · 12 Nov 2009 at 13:34

The worm, known as ikee, only affects "jail-broken" phones

Correction, it only affects jail-broken iPhones with OpenSSH installed, turned on and using the default password (root:alpine).

It's no more sophisticated than the attacks against routers that have WAN administration turned on by default with default credentials except they are using the cellular network rather than the Internet.

Common sense says you should change the default passwords.

Wicksta · 12 Nov 2009 at 23:53

It's also only effective on APNs which allow access to port 22. Most people in the UK should be safe from this kind of worm, but I would recommend changing any default passwords on any kind of device.