Just weeks ago there were reports of the first ever iphone worm, this was contagious on Jail broken handsets, but if your iphone is jail broken beware it was only through the cause of the SSH application, so if you don’t have that installed you will be fine! (Also users that have the SSH Application are most vulnerable if they haven’t changed the default root password)

rickroll-091109The worm was harmless fun, and was just “rickrolling” users which entailed changing the background image on the device to an image of Rick Astley.

Now, according to early reports of perculiar activity by a Dutch ISP, and later confirmed by Sophos (Leading Virus Detection), there’s a new worm in the wild, and this one is far more malicious.

The new worm is called “Duh” or “Ikee.B”, and it uses the exact same vulnerability as the first one. The fix is thus identical – change the root password in the SSH application to something other than the default, which is “alpine”.

Failing to do so might result in very serious problems.. According to Sophos, the virus is “designed to connect to a server in Lithuania and to follow orders from remote hackers.” This worm is mostly vulnerable to the countries listed: Netherlands, Portugal, Australia, Austria, and Hungary (these are the countries hit by the worm the hardest at the moment, but beware ALL jail broken iphones with the SSH application are at risk. Furthermore, it changes the root password on the iPhone to “ohshit”

Users who haven’t jailbroken their iPhone or haven’t installed the SSH application are not affected by this vulnerability.