iPhone Virus, Just the First?

If you are one of the many of Australian’s with a Jail broken iPhone you better sit up and taking note of some security issues and threat. Jail braking your iPhone allows hackers to gain access to the all the private information including emails, phone numbers and internet history.In today’s news the problem of iPhone security has come to the fore, read the following article form iTwire about this issue. We have also included an easy step by step guide on how to edit/change your iPhone SSH Password.

The virus, called Ikee, does a fabulous job of rickrolling iPhone users. Anyone infected will have their background picture changed to a picture of 1980s pop sensation Rick Astley with a message “ikee is never going to give you up.”

Ikee seeks out iPhones with SSH enabled but still using the default password (hint: it’s alpine). On non-jailbroken phones, SSH is disabled by default and so such users are unlikely to be affected; this is more likely to infect jailbroken iPhones which have had SSH enabled to permit easy access from other computers.

Sophos’ Graham Cluley, writing in his blog says “The worm will not affect users who have not jailbroken their iPhones or who have not installed SSH.” He goes on to say that “SophosLabs is analysing the worm’s code, which suggests that at least four variants have been written so far. One of the attributes of the latest variant (labelled the “D” version) is that it tries to hide its presence by using a filepath suggestive of the Cydia application.

“The source code is littered with comments from the author suggesting the worm has been written as an experiment. One of the comments berates affected users for not following instructions when installing SSH, because if they had changed the default password the worm would not have been able to infect them.”

It appears that the worm does nothing more than change the background and go looking for other iPhones to infect; but that doesn’t make it innocuous. Such access is well-defined as illegal under Australian law; additionally, the virus is a perfect test-bed for other, more malicious, people to add their own payload.

Change iPhone SSH Password