May 16, 2024

First iPhone Worm Rickrolls Unsuspecting Users

Posted November 9, 2009 at 10:12am by iClarified · 6727 views
Australian iPhone users are being infected with a worm which changes their wallpaper to an image of 1980s pop singer Rick Astley, according to Sophos.

The worm, which could have spread to other countries although we have no confirmed reports outside Australia, is capable of breaking into jailbroken iPhones if their owners have not changed the default password after installing SSH. Once in place, the worm appears to attempt to find other iPhones on the mobile phone network that are similarly vulnerable, and installs itself again

The worm was written by a hacker called ikex. It changes the lockscreen background to Rick Astleys picture and displays the message, "ikee is never going to give you up".

Why?: Boredom, because i found it so stupid the fact that on my initial scan of my 3G optus range i found 27 hosts running SSH daemons, i could access 26 of them with root:alpine. Doesn't anyone RTFM anymore?

So far about 4 variants of the worm have been found but apparently none thus far and intended to do any damage.

This worm will not affect everyone who has jailbroken. It only affects those who have installed SSH and failed to change the root password. You can find instructions on how to change your root password here.

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