Pioneer iPhone virus author lands developer job

Ashley Towns is the author of the ikee worm, which changes an infected iPhone's wallpaper to a picture of Rick Astley.

Ashley Towns, currently 21 years old, wrote on his Twitter feed that he had landed a job with Australian iPhone app developer Mogeneration. Towns is the author of the ikee worm, which changes an infected iPhone’s wallpaper to a picture of Rick Astley.

The ikee worm appeared approximately two weeks ago. While Towns says that the ikee worm was meant more of a prank rather than actually be malicious, the ikee worm’s structure arguably lay the groundwork for the iPhone Duh virus which surfaced over the weekend.

Towns used the ikee worm to demonstrate the vulnerability of iPhones (and other devices) when the default password for a service is not changed by the user. The ikee worm targets iPhones that have been jailbroken and have enabled SSH, but have not changed the default service password “alpine”, by simply trying to access the iPhone using the default password. If a user has not changed it into something more obscure, the worm would infect the iPhone.