Jailbroken Your iPhone? There’s a Worm For That

A new worm that targets jailbroken iPhone’s is reported to be in the wild and infecting iPhones in Australia.

The worm spreads to jailbroken iPhones where the user has not changed the root password for SSH access, and alters infected phones to show Rick Astley wallpaper and the message “ikee is never going to give you up.”

According to Sophos, there at least four variants of the worm written so far, and the “source code is littered with comments from the author suggesting the worm has been written as an experiment.” Another comment “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.”

If you have a jailbroken iPhone, you should at the very least change your SSH password to something other than the default (which is “alpine”) or alternatively if safe to do so, drop the jailbreak and reinstall the default iPhone software.