Security company Sophos has found an iPhone virus. Australians owning jailbroken iPhones have found that an unusual worm has infected their smartphones. The hacker’s name is apparently “ike_x” or “ikeeex” (according to his Twitter) and he has found a way to change the background of infected iPhones with a photo of Rick Astley.

Here’s Sophos’ official word about it:

On each installation, the worm - written by a hacker calling themselves “ikex” - changes the lock background wallpaper to an image of Rick Astley with the message:

ikee is never going to give you up

What’s clear is that if you have jailbroken your iPhone or iPod Touch, and installed SSH, then you must always change your root user password to something different than the default, “alpine”. In fact, it would be a good idea if you didn’t use a dictionary word at all.

The author of the iPhone worm means no harm for now. Still, that wouldn’t stop more malicious attacks in the future. Sophos explains:

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. Other inquisitive hackers may also be tempted to experiment once they read about the world’s first iPhone worm. Furthermore, a more malicious hacker could take the code written by ikee and adapt it to have a more sinister payload.

The hacker has been traced by Sophos. He has a MySpace page and a Twitter account. You can view his Twitter here.

His most recent message acknowledges his iphone hack and clarifies that he wasn’t covering his tracks, hence the messages found by Sophos.

[source]