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

Are iPhone Viruses Here To Stay? is a post from: TechStartups.com

By Senior Staff Writer – Tyler Knott Gregson

Looks like the dust has settled, the little scrubbing bubbles have gone through and wiped Twitter as clean as possible and any and all aftershocks of the Twitter Worm that was released over this past weekend are over. Now all that’s left is to decide what it all means, and what the heck actually happened.

So what DID happen? Thankfully for all of us, PCWorld broke it down and walked us through basically what went down with the “Mikeyy or StalkDaily” worm. Here’s what went down in the wee hours of the Easter weekend:

“Early on Saturday, April 11, the Mikeyy worm started to spread via Twitter posts by encouraging you to click on a link to a rival micro-blogging service StalkDaily.com. As soon as you clicked on the link your account would be infected and begin to send out similar messages encouraging your followers to visit StalkDaily. Then your followers would become infected and the worm’s infection rate would grow. You could also catch the worm by viewing infected profiles on Twitter.com.”

The Worm’s creator, 17-year-old founder of StalkDaily.com and the good news is that this worm was actually relatively harmless. The bad news is, this does open the door for other attacks to happen and in reality, Twitter dodged a fairly large bullet on this one. It would have been relatively simple for someone with worse intentions to tweak the virus script and use it to wreak absolute havoc. Luckily for all, it didn’t happen and the bullet was indeed dodged.

So that’s the jist of what you may have missed on Twitter over the weekend. Hopefully some checks and balances are put into effect that guarantee this doesn’t happen againn. Cross your fingers.

Twitter Worm: What Exactly Happened? is a post from: TechStartups.com