First iPhone Worm Targets Jailbroken iPhones [WARNING]

originally posted at 73 Wire Business and technology

via Mashable
Everyone has been “Rick-Rolled” but this is a little much. Sophos has the story about how the new worm changes the user’s lock screen wallpaper with a picture of Rick Astley:

Apple iPhone owners in Australia have reported that their smartphones have been infected by a worm that has changed their wallpaper to an image of 1980s pop crooner Rick Astley.

The worm, which could have spread to other countries although we have no confirmed reports outside Australia, is capable of breaking into jailbroken iPhones if their owners have not changed the default password after installing SSH. Once in place, the worm appears to attempt to find other iPhones on the mobile phone network that are similarly vulnerable, and installs itself again

On each installation, the worm – written by a hacker calling themselves “ikex” – changes the lock background wallpaper to an image of Rick Astley with the message:

ikee is never going to give you up

As with most worms out there, it is mostly a script kid out there just making life a little more chaotic. The worm does not seem to have any real harm other than changing the user’s lock screen wallpaper on the iPhone.

…
The source code is littered with comments from the author suggesting the worm has been written as an experiment. One of the comments berates affected users for not following instructions when installing SSH, because if they had changed the default password the worm would not have been able to infect them.

….

The worm’s author appears to have realised that people might be interested to learn why he wrote the worm, and posted this explanation inside the code:
Why?: Boredom, because i found it so stupid the fact that on my initial scan of my 3G optus range i found 27 hosts running SSH daemons, i could access 26 of them with root:alpine. Doesn’t anyone RTFM anymore?

Always be careful when unlocking a phone or jailbreaking for the iPhone. Jailbreaking is used to give the iPhone more functionality to the iPhone, but always change he password when you do jailbreak the iPhone, and use a strong password with capital letters, numbers and symbols in it.