World’s first iPhone worm Rick rolls your phone

Yes, you read that right. The first worm to come to the iPhone doesn’t erase all of your data, steal your information, or even turn your phone into a brick. This worm, in all its glory, simply changes your lock screen wallpaper to famous British pop star Rick Astley with a message that reads, “Ikee is never going to give you up.” While it is scary in and of itself that this hacker—whom I presume goes by Ikee—is able to make such a change to your phone’s data, you’ll be delighted to hear this fear should only be for people with jailbroken iPhones. Not only must you have a jailbroken iPhone, but you must also have installed the SSH application and kept the default password as “alpine.” Ahh, not so scary anymore.

While this attack didn’t prove catastrophic for anyone, it shows how dangerous the iPhone could become if certain access falls into the wrong hands. It raises questions; if this hacker could get into the device and change the background, what other data could he have accessed? Yet, it also leaves me wondering whether this will serve as inspiration to other potential iPhone hackers to up the ante and prove more dangerous. Hopefully this slight data alteration is as far as we see these hacks go, as I’d hate to see the jailbroken community have to suffer.

Via [Dark Reading]