Behind Your Business

Apple iPhone owners Down Under are reporting their jailbroken iPhones have been hit with a worm that hijacks their wallpaper, changing it to an image of 1980s pop star Rick Astley, and eats up their bandwidth. Although the worm may have spread beyond Australia, there are no confirmed reports yet.

The hacker, who calls himself ikex, claims to have infected 100 iPhones with the malware. The true identity of ikex is 21-year-old Ashley Towns, who shows no public remorse about the hack.

SophosLabs is analyzing the worm's code, which suggests that at least four variants have been written. One of the attributes of the latest variant is that it tries to hide its presence by using a file path suggestive of the Cydia jailbreaking tool.

How the Hack Worked

Sophos said Towns was able to hack jailbroken iPhones if the users did not change the default password after installing SSH (Secure Shell). Installing the SSH server turns the iPhone into a cell-phone modem using the data connection. In order to avoid the hack, users would have needed to change their root password to something different than the default.

What makes this outbreak interesting is that it's the first virus to ever spread between iPhones in the wild, said Graham Cluley, a senior security consultant at Sophos.

"In itself it's not the most dangerous piece of malware we've ever seen," Cluley said. "It breaks into jailbroken iPhones that have not been properly secured and changes the wallpaper to a picture of Rick Astley before finding other iPhones to infect."

The result, as Cluley explained it, is that affected users would need to take action to repair their iPhones from the unauthorized modifications, a nuisance that takes time.

The Cost of Jailbreaking

What's more, he explained, the worm's author will have cost each infected iPhone user all the bandwidth...