New iPhone Worm is a Threat to 'Jailbroken' iPhones

Apple's iPhone users in Australia are being seriously warned about the first ever iPhone worm.

This particular worm changes the wallpaper of the device to expose an image of 80's pop singer Rick Astley and shows the message 'ikee is never going to give you up'. The hacker told he created the worm to make users familiar with the risk of not to change the default password for their phone.

The infection with a nickname 'Ikee' spreads only among iPhones that have been 'jailbroken'. Jailbreaking is a process that removes uses modified firmware software so that iPhone users are able to essentially "unlock" their phone allowing users to install programs that are not approved by the official Apple app store. In jailbreaking an iPhone it can remove protection tools from the device making it more vulnerable to attacks. A majority of software packages that users install for 'jailbreaking' their iPhones offer a service known as Secure Shell (SSH).

This service enables the devices to be accessed distantly over the Internet with a special password. The concern is that the most usual 'jailbreaking' software installs SSH using a default password. Therefore, users who 'jailbroke' their iPhone but never changed the default password are vulnerable to be 'Rickrolled' by this worm. Apple doesn't support jailbroken phones and has attempted to defend against 'jailbreaking' practices through software updates. The company has also declared that iPhone 'jailbreaking' is not legal.

F-Secure notifies that the creator of the worm has released full source code of the four current variants of this worm. This means that there will be more variants and they might have more devistating payload other than the actions of just changing the wallpaper.

Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant at security firm Sophos predicts that more attacks like this may appear in the future. He noted that just last week a Dutch hacker tried to access unsafe phones and demanded money for instructions on how to fix the loophole. Security experts say that as long as users' iPhones are not jailbroken, they should be secure from the Ikee worm.