An Australian, Rick-rolling iPhone worm is now spreading internationally. Bloggers admire their new Rick Astley wallpaper, complete with "ikee is never gonna give you up" macro.
The first worm written for Apple's iPhone has been unleashed and is infecting phones. ... It changes the victim's wallpaper to a photograph of 80s singer Rick Ashley and then seeks out other phones to infect ... could be modified to do something more dangerous.
Because the writer released source code for four separate variants, it wouldn't be surprising for copycats in other regions to appropriate the attack code and potentially imbue it with more malicious payloads. Instructions for changing the iPhone's root password are here.
On jail broken iPhones, SSH is installable with a package from Cydia that allows you to connect to your phone and make changes to the file system. It does this by logging into the root user with the password "alpine."
After installing SSH, it is always recommended that you change "alpine" to the password of your choosing. This hack can only affect people who chose not to change that password.
Accessing someone else's computing device and changing their data without permission is an offence in many countries - and just as with graffiti there is a cost involved in cleaning-up affected iPhones.
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.
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