“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.]
You buncha suckers……
Sob…I fell for it tooo…damnit
are you finnished?
My neighbor told me this morning (he’s “a PC”) and he’s positive the worm is present on every iPhone.
@ alansky
That in fact would be a good reason. There are plenty of good reasons still to jailbreak the iPhone… I never disputed that. But there are fewer than there used to be early on.
@Gabriel
I’m well aware that this exploit only affects jailbroken iPhones, thus my qualifier “jailbroken iPhones in particular”. Perhaps that wasn’t worded as clearly as it could have been. *shrug* But yes.. security by obscurity is utter hogwash. If someone did things to compromise the security of their Mac OS X, like jailbreaking the iPhone without taking the simple measure of changing their root password has shown, it certainly would fall prey.
I can’t wait to see if/how the Droid gets compromised due to its “openness”. I would say it would totally undermine all confidence in the platform, but then all the sheeple who buy into it to begin with are probably used to that sort of thing and expect it.
FatBastard: “more malware for it than any other phone on the market?” Where did you pull that statistic from?
Thanks MDN I needed a chuckle.
Damn You All MDN, you got me too! Ugh!!!!!!
That guy ROCKS!!!!
MDN absolutely got me, thanks.
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@Dave
Out of my buttocks actually. Do you have hard numbers or anecdotal evidence to the contrary? I don’t ever recall having read of any malware infecting any other cell phone in the past, though I won’t discount the possibility entirely. I didn’t claim it was true anyway… I asked if I “got it right”.
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TheConfuzed1: You keep it though–Keep playing in Apple’s sandbox, and we’ll keep going to the beach.
That’s one way to put it.
On the other hand, I appreciate not having to worry about sharks or tsunamis. And that’s me being a pretty good swimmer myself, in staying with the metaphor.
But please don’t come crying with your bloody stump when your appetite for risk may have outdone your capability to secure your hacked iPhone on your own.
Your competence as a Unix admin may not be as substantial as you’re thinking, and the jailbreak hackers on the internet may not be as trustworthy as you’ve believed them to be either.
“changes the phone’s wallpaper to a picture of 80s singer Rick Astley”
Good gawd!
Just watch kids. TROLLS will infiltrate and BLAME APPLE! Like this worm has anything to do with Apple security. I can hardly wait to pound them into troll mush.
Conclusion: You jailbreak, you take responsibility.
TheConfuzed1… You are clearly a Windows user with an iphone.
Any Apple people with an iphone know what the difference is besides being able to change your wall paper and squeeze more than four onto the lower dash care to comment?
Worldwide turn-by-turn navigation with xGPS. Upcoming events on the lock screen. USB mass storage mode. Skype over 3G. Putting apps to the background while allowing them to keep running. Adblock for Safari. Changing settings without closing the current app. Tweets and status updates in the middle of a game.
I’m sure there are others.
Thanks Ipp0… The fact you can have apps running in the background makes it worth while for me. Didn’t realise it was so locked down.
Just be careful not to enable SSH, or at least change the default pass
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