How to protect your jailbroken iPhone from worms

Rating: The answer is alpine. What was the question again?

Checking out a blog on  ‘Virus migration from desktop to mobile’  from virus specialist, AVG, it struck GoMo News that the fix for an iWorm that afflicts only ‘jailbroken’ iPhones needs more publicity. Just change the default password from ‘apline’. OK?

Last month the security software community identified what was probably the first ever iPhone ‘worm’. Worms steal information but can’t replicate like a virus so technically they are just malware.

F-Secure,  for example,  has labelled the original iWorm the ‘ikee’ worm as it puts a picture of Rick [ikee] Astly onto the iPhone’s home screen. A more serious version of it is identified here by F-Secure.

The point is, however, that affected iPhones have to be ‘unlocked’ – a practice which the iPhone community refers to as ‘jail-breaking’. Next the iPhone has to be running a program called SSH, which allows people to connect to the iPhone remotely over the internet.

And finally, the iWorm only succeeds if you haven’t changed the password from the default – which is ‘apline’. So do it now.

The iPhone worm was illuded to by AVG’s chief research officer, Roger Thompson, who was writing on his blog in answer to the asked the question, “How will viruses migrate from the desktop to mobile devices?”

His answer is “with great difficulty.” The real answer is … they can’t. Unless GoMo News is very much mistaken, there’s no handset in existence which possesses an operating system (OS) which is exactly the same as a desktop.

The closest you could get is, perhaps, a virus which afflicts Windows CE based devices because some of those are closer to netbooks than handsets. But a true virus has to be able to replicate itself and that means getting into the very heart of the OS.

GoMo News can recall Psion’s then chief technical officer, Charles Davies, saying if you wrote a decent OS in the first place, it wouldn’t be afflicted by a virus. Nobody bothered with Psion’s OS, EPOC. But for its successor, Symbian, they did create a virus. It had become a worthwhile feat.

Roger Thompson’s advice on protecting yourself from a mobile virus or worm is to,  “Ask yourself “how are the developers making money from this?” If you can’t see a good answer, you should be sceptical about installing it.”

That’s probably because AVG doesn’t actually offer anti-virus software for mobile phones. Maybe the company is about to launch something. For Android based handsets would be the logical choice.

In the meantime both F-Secure and Trend Micro (here) have anti-virus products which run on mobile handsets. If anybody writes a mobile worm or a virus, these apps should catch  it.