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Surprising Science

iPhone Worm

A more intrusive iPhone worm than the recent “Rick Astley” hack is worrying Apple as it puts sensitive information under threat of exploitation.

“Another iPhone worm has been spotted in the wild. Unlike the previous exploitation, which merely changed a jailbroken iPhone’s wallpaper to a picture of Rick Astley of ‘Rickrolling’ fame, this new threat allows hackers to steal sensitive information. According to security firm Sophos, which wrote about the exploitation after a Dutch ISP spotted it late last week, the worm attacks jailbroken iPhone and iPod Touch devices only. The worm ‘uses command-and-control, like a traditional PC botnet,’ Sophos wrote in a blog post on Saturday to warn users about the exploit. ‘It configures two startup scripts, one to execute the worm on boot-up, and the other to create a connection to a Lithuanian server to upload stolen data and cede control to the bot master.’ Jailbreaking, which has been around for about two years, is a hack that enables iPhone and iPod Touch users to download applications unavailable through Apple’s App Store.”


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