There has been a new worm that is targeting specifically jailbroken iPhones reported in Australia today. The worm is named after its creator Ikee.

     The Ikee worm doesn’t seem to do anything harmful to the iPhone other than changing the wallpaper to the infamous Rick Astley just as an annoyance. While the worm is invasive and a nuisence I have to agree with the purpose it is driven by. It targets iPhones via SSH and spreads just like any worm would from iPhone to iPhone. But Ikee created this worm to point out how unsecure people are being while jailbreaking their iPhones. So many users are not taking security seriously and changing their root password when installing OpenSSH on their phones causing them to be easily accesable by any 5 year old with a computer.

     Basically the moral of this story is always change your root password to something more secure than the default password. We are lucky that this was a more honest hacker and no information was being stolen from the infected iPhones, that we know of. But in the future it could be your credit card, bank account, or any other number of private information that could be tracked and stolen.

     So we ask that all users please follow these simple instructions to change your root password:

• Download Terminal.app from Cydia or use some other SSH terminal program for Mac/PC and access your iPhone.
• Enter the command passwd into the terminal.
• It should ask for your current password which should be “alpine” by default.
• Then it should ask for you to enter your new password.
• Process complete!

     By following these steps it will make it much harder for any playful or malicious hacker to ever infiltrate your iPhone and have a look around!