Worm that Affects Jailbroken iPhones

Techtree News Staff, Nov 09, 2009 1300 hrs IST

Sets up popstar Rick Astley as lock background wallpaper

Apple's much loved toys have been often jailbroken and unlocked so that they can be used freely. While several continue to jailbreak their iPhone OS devices, the first worm for iPhone OS platform hits the jailbroken iPhones. This new worm changes the iPhone wallpaper and set's it to 1980's popstar Rick Astley. A user posted information about his iPhone struck by the worm at the Australian Forum Whirlpool.

The first iPhone worm is said to be created by hacker called "ike_x". Along with changing the lock background of iPhone with Rick Astely's photo, the worm also causes text stating 'ikee is never going to give you up' on the top of the wallpaper. Apparently, the worm strikes the jailbroken handsets with SSH (Secure Shell) installed through Cydia. Those iPhones with SSH installed having default password as "alpine" were mainly affected.

Follow the SSH security steps offered by Redmond Pie blog and then try the quick fix for the users has been posted at Bin's Tech blog.

Sophos's senior security research Graham Cluley got to the code of the "ikee" worm and suggested users to change their SSH passwords for jailbroken iPhones immediately. Cluley narrowed down to the code and found out that hacker named Ash who also exists on Twitter.

Apple will surely make it a point to mention this worm for jailbroken iPhones to spread the message about how bad it can be to jailbreak iPhone OS devices. However, it looks like the hacker's motive was to reveal the vulnerability in the SSH program and not hack the iPhones.

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USER COMMENTS

My password had been changed from the default. I just got an email from university IT saying "An IP address associated with your login credentials has initiated ssh scans of an external network (Optus)." I replied asking if this could be a normal network scanning behaviour but they said they have not seen it before... should I do a full restore? I don't want to have to rejailbreak and reinstall everything! Is there a way to check for malicious code and remove it without restoring/unjailbreaking?

by Sarah, Canberra, on Nov 16, 2009 09:51 AM, Report abuse Reply

I love thid ikee_x..He is grt..

by iamgod, komoda, on Nov 09, 2009 07:37 PM, Report abuse Reply