By Staff Writer – Boonsri Dickinson (@boonspoon)

In July, Apple warned that jail-broken iPhones could give hackers an easy way in. People jail-break their phones because it allows them to download apps that don’t go through Apple’s tight rope and lets them run unofficial code on their machine. But it can also make their smartphone vulnerable to an attack, as 21-year-old Ashley Towns successfully demonstrated last week.

Towns created a virus that infected hundreds of peoples’ iPhones with 80s pop singer Rick Astley wallpaper — a practice known as Rickrolling. The worm called ‘iKee’ spread the message: ‘ikee is never going to give you up’.

The virus was unleashed through SSH access on jail-broken iPhones. Once in the system, the worm looked for other jail-broken devices to infect. But the worm seems to be pretty harmless so far, and probably won’t land him in jail. Towns received death treats after someone published his phone number online. But Town says he also received a few job offers.

With one out of every 63 Smartphones infected with mobile spyware and 8 percent of iPhones jail-broken, perhaps there is reason to worry. The Wall Street Journal has offered some ways to protect yourself to make your smartphones a little less stupid: Make sure you watch malicious text messages, set limits on apps, and have a plan to remotely wipe out data if you lose your phone.

The jailbreak community is here to stay and the attacks by hackers are in their infancy. Days after Town unleashed his virus, a second one exploited the same vulnerabilities as iKee, but upped the ante as it searched systems for SNS messages, Internet history, and contact lists.

Apple is currently looking for someone to manage their jailbreak police squad that will fight this underground world.

Image: flickr/ Huhness