Australian Guy Made The First iPhone Virus

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Under: Mobile

On November - 10 - 2009 View Comments

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A 21 year old Australian man named Ashley Towns has admitted creating a virus, which is thought to be first for iPhone.

The virus code named ‘Ikee’ spreads from phone to phone and changes the wallpaper of the infected devices to a photograph of 1980s singer Rick Astley – best known for his hit Never Gonna Give You Up.

The wallpaper features the quote ‘Ikee is never gonna give you up’ according to the hit number.

However, the virus can only affect the phones which have been jailbroken (i.e. to phones which were unlocked to run non-Apple signed applications to run on iPhones). It takes the advantage of the low security aware iPhone users who don’t change the default password afteer setting up their device.

According to Ashley, the virus was written to raise the issue of security and not harmful to infected devices apart from changing the wallpaper. “I think to raise awareness for one, somebody with more malicious intent could have done anything – read your SMSs, go through your emails, view your contacts, photos – anything.”

The ‘Ikee’ virus can be get rid quite easily by changing the password and deleting a few files, and only takes a couple of minutes. [ABC]

Image source: [ABC]