Just this past week we told you about a vulnerability that all jailbreaked iPhones are at risk for, due to there being a default root password for SSH that most people who jailbreak their iPhones don’t (know to) change. Now, taking advantage of that same ‘default root password’ issue, countless jailbroke iPhone owners are finding Rick Astley’s mug on their iPhone, as jailbroken iPhones get “rickrolled” by the Ikee worm. (A “rickroll” is a fad that started a couple of years ago when, inexplicably, the video of Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” became the visual punchline to tricks played across the Internet, with links to supposedly topical content actually taking the user to the Astley video.)
Although the Ikee worm seems to be primarily affecting users in Australia (indeed, once on the infected iPhone, Ikee scans for a set of IP addresses which are primarily in Australia), according to Mikko Hyppönen of Internet security firm F-Secure, “The creator of the worm has released full source code of the four existing variants of this worm. This means that there will quickly be more variants, and they might have nastier payload than just changing your wallpaper or might try password cracking to gain access to devices where the default password has been changed.”
So, once again, the lesson here is a) don’t hack your devices if you don’t know what you’re doing, and b) if you have jailbroken your iPhone, change that root password.
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