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Meet the world's first iPhone worm
By siliconindia
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Monday, 09 November 2009, 19:13 IST
Bangalore: Jailbroken iPhones have many advantages over the normal iPhones. The hack greatly expands the capabilities of the Apple smartphone but it can also make it more vulnerable. Australian iPhone users learned this the hard way when they found their phones hit by self-replicating attacks that display an image of 1980s heartthrob Rick Astley.
The attacks, which researchers say are the world's first iPhone worm in the wild, targets jailbroken iPhones that have secure shell (SSH) software installed and keep Apple's default root password of "alpine." In addition to showing a well-coiffed picture of Astley, the new wallpaper displays the message "ikee is never going to give you up," a play on Astley's saccharine addled 1987 hit "Never Gonna Give You Up," according to The Register.
A review of some of the source code, shows that the malware, once installed, searches the mobile phone network for other vulnerable iPhones and when it finds one, copies itself to them using the the default password and SSH, a Unix application also known as secure shell.
A forum Whirlpool first reported these iPhone attacks. "I foolishly had forgot to change my root and user password last time I had jailbroke my phone," wrote one forum participant. In addition to his own iPhone being attacked, he said a flatmate's iPhone 3G was also sullied with the image of Astley. Users who tried to delete the image were chagrined to find it reappear once they rebooted their device.
So who is behind these attacks? Unlike other worm writers, the person who claimed the responsibility to these attacks says he is doing this to spread the awareness. Going by the name ikee, this hacker wrote this program to make people aware of the dangers of not changing their password. "I was quite amazed by the number of people who didn't read the manual and change their default passwords," the unidentified worm writer said. "I admit I probably pissed of a few people, but it was all in good fun (well ok for me anyway)." ikee said the worm disables the SSH daemon so it can't be targeted further.
Even though ikee hacked people's iPhone to spread awareness, this idea can inspire other hackers to get cracking to take further benefit of such hacked iPhones.
