iPhone News Updated

Rickrolling Worm on iPhone Highlights Security Issues

An Australian hacker, 21-year-old Ashley Towns, has written the iPhones first worm program, a viral computer program which can hack into devices changing user’s iPhone settings.

In this case the worm is not overly malicious, it merely changes the background wallpaper on the iPhone to a picture of 80s pop legend, Rick Astley, a star who has earned internet infamy for the phenomenon of Rickrolling.

Mr Towns said in an interview with Australian television that he wanted to spread public awareness of the absolute necessity for mobile phone users to change their default password regularly and that is why he created the worm.

The worm will only affect those iPhone users who have “jailbroken” their handsets. Jailbreaking an iPhone involves bypassing the official Apple operating system, and makes it possible to run programs on the phone not previously approved by Apple.

Not surprisingly, Apple states that jailbreaking is illegal and has taken measures to prevent it happening by means of new software updates.

Mikko Hypponen of F-Secure said on his blog that there was now source code for four variants of worm and that “there will quickly be more variants, and they might have nastier payload than just changing your wallpaper.”

iPhones that have been jailbroken are only susceptible to these worms if users are running a program on it called SSH which allows them to connect to the mobile phone on the Internet. However, all is not lost, as the virus threat can still be removed by mobile phone users changing their default password for their handset.

[Thanks: http://www.mobilemarketingnews.co.uk]

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