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Worm rickrolls jail-broken iPhones

Monday, November 9, 2009 · 9:18 am · 42 Comments

“The first worm to infect the Apple iPhone has been discovered spreading ‘in the wild’ in Australia,” BBC News reports.

“The self-propagating program changes the phone’s wallpaper to a picture of 80s singer Rick Astley with the message ‘ikee is never going to give you up,’” The Beeb reports. “The worm, known as ikee, only affects ‘jail-broken’ phones, where a user has removed Apple’s protection mechanisms to allow the phone to run any software.”

The Beeb reports, “Experts say the worm is not harmful but more malicious variants could follow. ‘The creator of the worm has released full source code of the four existing variants of this worm,’ wrote Mikko Hypponen of security firm F-secure.”

Full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Jailbreak at your own risk. Check out this video of a jailbroken iPhone being taken over by “ikee” via YouTube here.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader "JMS in TX" for the heads up.]

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Comment Feed

42 Comments

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no!

Monday, November 9, 2009 - 10:22 am · Reply

Ahhh! I fell for it!
Scott

Monday, November 9, 2009 - 10:23 am · Reply

Damn you MDN!
Jarrettdailynews

Monday, November 9, 2009 - 10:24 am · Reply

There is always a reward. Could be a good reward or a bad reward, I always tell my kids, you will always be reward for an action.
Jarrettdailynews

Monday, November 9, 2009 - 10:25 am · Reply

I know spelling nazi’s, should be rewarded towards the end.
ping

Monday, November 9, 2009 - 10:29 am · Reply

This is yet another example of people biting off more than they can chew.

The jailbreak as such is actually not the problem, but blindly installing the ssh daemon in the process and then letting it run with unchanged default passwords (which are never used nor even accessible in a non-jailbroken iPhone) opens a huge barn door with a blinking neon sign on top: “Rape me, please!”

One would also need to know that updating a jailbroken iPhone will reset the passwords to the universally known defaults again, so any user with a running sshd will need to keep a keen eye on the state of his or her sshd and the respective passwords in order to stay mostly safe…

Removing most of the iPhone’s safety barriers is a really bad idea if you don’t know very precisely what you are doing – and quite possibly even then.

So unless you really understand all the implications, please don’t alter your iPhone in unsupported ways – you may live to regret it.

Stay safe!
silverwarloc

Monday, November 9, 2009 - 10:33 am · Reply

To all the Jailbreakers:

You get what you paid for…in this case…a big worm. I hope it s long one. Welcome to the social.
NCIceman

Monday, November 9, 2009 - 10:34 am · Reply

LOL it got me too! Fished in!
Maul

Monday, November 9, 2009 - 10:43 am · Reply

That video should be banned under the Geneva Convention.
Jamie

Monday, November 9, 2009 - 10:46 am · Reply

Wonder what all the people saying Apple are too closed are thinking now Rick Astley is all over their iPhones?

I think I hear a waaahmbulance coming for them all

iPhone 3G, not jailbroken, working fine.
Regular Reader

Monday, November 9, 2009 - 10:54 am · Reply

You never think you can happen to you. The other people were just foolish. But then one day, just another ordinary day, and WHAM…RickRoll’d.

They say the therapy will help…
Jerry

Monday, November 9, 2009 - 10:56 am · Reply

I still don’t see any benefits to jail breaking. Except for a few customising tweaks (which apple will allow eventually anyway) whats the real benefits?
x

Monday, November 9, 2009 - 11:01 am · Reply

These guys at F-secure are baiting lying ass dogs. I’ve seen this before from these asshole Finns. Baiters, trying to sell their shit software via scare tactics. Whores of the worst kind.

They go around like the whores they are saying iPhones have a worm now. They don’t. If someone removes the security mechanisms they cannot claim iPhone has a worm. Only Finnish asswhores do that.

I expect this scum shit from Microsoft’s fools, but I guess it has infected these Finnish whores now just the same.
Peter North

Monday, November 9, 2009 - 11:05 am · Reply

Whoooaa x, who crawled up your shorts?
x

Monday, November 9, 2009 - 11:19 am · Reply

@Peter North

The whore Finns at F-secure did. Hows the acting going … though you were dead!
TowerTone

Monday, November 9, 2009 - 11:37 am · Reply

That’s odd. I’ve had that same picture on my screen for years….
ping

Monday, November 9, 2009 - 11:45 am · Reply

TowerTone: That’s odd. I’ve had that same picture on my screen for years….

Ah, patient zero…!
TheConfuzed1

Monday, November 9, 2009 - 11:48 am · Reply

To those of you who say there is no benefit from jailbreaking, great; don’t jailbreak.

For those of us who do see the value though, we will continue to do so.

Clearly, if the value wasn’t there, we wouldn’t be doing it.

You keep it though–Keep playing in Apple’s sandbox, and we’ll keep going to the beach.

After all, Apple will eventually (never) open this stuff up to us out of the box anyway, right?

I’m not going to extole the virtues of jailbreaking here in this post. Clearly you’re not the target demographic.
Fat Basterd

Monday, November 9, 2009 - 11:52 am · Reply

So let me get this straight…. the iPhone… jailbroken iPhones in particular… now has more malware for it than any other phone on the market? Even though jailbroken iPhones account for, what, less than 3% perhaps, of all phones in the world?

This alone should be proof enough that security by obscurity is NOT what is keeping malware off Mac OS X. Sadly, it won’t be.
tt

Monday, November 9, 2009 - 11:55 am · Reply

and I freaking lost the game!!

now is this news real?

this is just one of the reasons I havnt hacked my ipod touch yet…
ApplePi

Monday, November 9, 2009 - 11:58 am · Reply

I’ve been looking for this video forever! Thanks MDN!
Fat Basterd

Monday, November 9, 2009 - 12:00 pm · Reply

@Jerry

Early on with jailbreaking, there were some considerable benefits. Access to some apps for additional functionality that didn’t exist on the iPhone thanks to the non-existence of the Apps Store. Even now, there are a few apps that do things that nothing in the Apps Store can do thanks to restrictions imposed by Apple. I still jailbreak mine for a couple apps, one of which is a ringtone randomizer to cycle through my growing collection of ringtones.
Original Shiva

Monday, November 9, 2009 - 12:01 pm · Reply

Can a jail broken iPhone be restored by resetting it on iTunes?
Gabriel

Monday, November 9, 2009 - 12:29 pm · Reply

@ Fat Basterd – This worm only affects jailbroken iPhones. Non-jailbroken iPhones remain secure, despite what it may appear from attention-seeking headlines on other “news” sites.

Your comment on “security by obscurity” does indeed hold true. Jailbroken iPhones comprise a minority of all iPhones in the world, and yet they’ve fallen to this worm, while non-jailbroken iPhones (which comprise the vast majority) are safe. Which does indeed prove that it’s the presence of vulnerabilities which result in exploits – not merely the sheer number of users.
alansky

Monday, November 9, 2009 - 12:32 pm · Reply

@Fat Basterd:

The absence of tethering on the iPhone is sorely missed by many. This particular restriction comes from AT&T;, not Apple. I would think that the desire to tether the iPhone would tempt many people to jailbreak their iPhones.
MacRaven

Monday, November 9, 2009 - 1:02 pm · Reply

Don’t mess with what Apple has created. It’s that simple.