iPhone Worm RickRolls Jailbreakers

For those that are never gonna give up jailbroken iPhones, beware. A new worm is taking advantage of insecure settings on the phone’s SSH service to upload a new background on vulnerable systems- that of 80’s pop star Rick Astley. The picture promises to never let you down or desert you.

From Dark Reading here:

Users of insecure, jailbroken iPhones are reporting their smartphones have been hit by a worm that turns their lock wallpaper to that of 1980s pop star Rick Astley.

It may seem mostly harmless with its wallpaper-changing payload, but the first-ever worm to spread via iPhones could be an omen of more sinister attacks to come.

SophosLabs is warning iPhone users who have jailbroken their devices to ensure they have not left their smartphones open to infection.

Affected users in Australia have reported the wallpaper shown when they lock their iPhones is changed to an image of 1980s British pop star Rick Astley, with a message:

“ikee is never going to give you up”

The worm, which could have spread to other countries, is capable of breaking into jailbroken iPhones if their owners have not changed the default password (“alpine”) after installing SSH. Once in place, the worm hunts for other iPhones that are similarly vulnerable on the mobile phone network, and installs itself again.

I have often wondered when botnets are going to spread by iPhone. Could you imagine an App that allows you to participate (freely or otherwise) in a denial of service attack against a website? Remember the Iranian elections? If you could have had an app that sent traffic designed to bring down a site, would you have used it?