Worm wriggles into the iPhone

Surfacing last week was a worm virus released to infect Apple iPhones.

You’ve been RickRoll’d…

The Ikee worm replaces the iPhones wallpaper with a pic of ‘80s pop star Rick Astley and the message “ikee is never going to give you up”.

Able to infect jailbroken iPhones with SSH installed, where iPhone owners have not changed their default root password, the author says he wanted to raise awareness of the stupidity of not changing your password,

“It’s so simple to just change your password – it takes about 10 seconds maybe even less – and would protect all of your phone’s personal data SMSs, emails, address book, everything.” he said.

Harmless or not?

The Ikee worm at this stage has confused and annoyed only iPhone users here in Australia, however the possibility of it further spreading isn’t so far fetched.

Whilst the worms author says its intentions were supposedly harmless and its actions not malicious, as Sophos suggests:

Other inquisitive hackers may also be tempted to experiment once they read about the world’s first iPhone worm. Furthermore, a more malicious hacker could take the code written by ikee and adapt it to have a more sinister payload.”

The author has reportedly been contacted from people via Twitter for the code, which of course could lead to all sorts of malicious intentions malware being released into the iPhone world.

As a worm virus such as this spreads via WiFi to jailbroken iPhones, unless iPhone users protect their iPhones by changing their root password after installation of SSH – and their private data – it could have far more detrimental implications.

Unsure how to change your iPhone root password? PCWorld advises F-Secure has some helpful tips and info.

Finally, Sophos warns:

The bandwidth used by the worm will come out of users’ monthly data quotes or – depending on their payment plan – out of excess data charges. Lord forbid you should be unknowingly roaming overseas whilst infected!”

That’s not something iPhone users want to hear….