Taking a quick time out from the usual family news to spread awareness of a new iPhone worm. Yes, you read that right.. a second and new worm for the iphone has been released into the wild and no, I’m not talking about the ikee worm that was released weeks back or the data-stealing from last week.
iPhone infected with ikee worm
First, its embarassing but I have to put my hand up and own up to the fact that I was responsible for Ashley’s iPhone being hit by the ikee worm. Embarrassing because I’m supposed to be a trained IT professional, have been involved in and running various IT security projects, setting up corporate CERT and security response teams as well as working on corporate internet firewalls and etc. I should know better and it should never have happened. Unfortunately, every IT security person out there knows that its the little things that end-users forget that trip you up.
After getting Ashley a new iPhone, I jail-broke it so that she could have customized wall-papers, ringtones and whatever other things that teenagers do to their phones. Unfortunately, I’d forgotten to reset the root password and after a sleep-over at a friend’s home, she shows me her phone and I’m greeted with a picture of Rick Astley. BTW, I liked his songs when I had just entered National Service at 18 but you know the typical response of all teenagers.. my girl thought it was so uncool!
Am kicking myself for it now but I spent a couple of hours restoring the original firmware, going through the jailbreak process and pulling apps and other custom stuff again as well as syncing all of her stuff back into the iphone again. This time around, I remembered to reset the password for the root account and just because I’m security paranoid, i also took the trouble of resetting the mobile user account password (defaults to “dottie”) as well and testing all of the stock apps to make sure they remained in working condition because of those changes.
But we digress from the main point of this post.. which is the fact that a new worm for the iPhone has been released. You can read about the new variant of the worm on Macworld. Doesn’t look like it’s been named as yet but it is essentially a variant of ikee but has a more malicious payload targetting ING’s internet banking users. Now that it’s out, expect to see more viruses and worms targetting the iPhone appearing.
If you are an iPhone user but have not jailbroken your phones, you may rest easy for now.. such viruses and worms won’t affect you.. for now.
If you are an iPhone user, have jail-broken your phones and installed OpenSSH, carry out the following instructions as soon as possible to secure your jail-broken phone:
- Launch Cydia and install a terminal emulator eg. MobileTerminal.
- When installed, launch the app. You will see a command line terminal.
- Type “su” in it and hit the Return on the soft keyboard.
- At the password prompt, enter the default password for the root account, “alpine”.
- Type the command “passwd” into the terminal window
- Enter a new password and tap the “Return” key
- Re-enter the new password to confirm confirmation.
- Hit the round Home button to exit the terminal and return to your normal phone screens.
iphone command line terminal
If you’ve done all the above, you should be safe till whenever the virus writers become more savvy and come up with more of them.
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- adrian t
