80s pop star emerges on iPhones as worm

Australian model Lara Bingle launches the new iPhone 3G S at a Vodafone store in Sydney, Australia. Photo / Cameron Spencer/Getty Images

Apple iPhone owners in Australia have reported that their smartphones have been infected by a worm that has changed their wallpaper to an image of 1980s pop star Rick Astley.

On each installation the worm, which is written by a hacker who goes by the name of 'ikex', changes the lock background wallpaper to an image of Rick Astley with the message: ikee is never going to give you up.

The use of Rick Astley is believed to be a nod to the internet phenomenon known as "Rickrolling".

This is where web users are duped into clicking on to what they believe is a relevant link, only to find that it actually takes them to a video of Astley's hit song "Never gonna give you up".

At this stage, the worm appears to only affect "jailbroken" phones.

In a jailbroken phone, a user has removed Apple's protection mechanisms to allow the phone to run any software.

The worm can break into jailbroken iPhones if owners have not changed the default password after installing SSH.

Once in place, the worm then tries to find other iPhones on the mobile phone network that are similarly vulnerable and then install itself again reports online site Sophos.

The source code contains comments from its author that suggest the worm has been written as an experiment, says Sophos.

One of the comments berates affected users for not following instructions when installing SSH, and implies that if owners had changed the default password the worm would not have been able to infect them, saying: "People are stupid, and this is to prove it so".

Experts are urging people who have jail-broken their iPhones and installed SSH to change the user password to something different than the default, "alpine".

For further protection, it is recommended that the password be changed to a non-dictionary word.

No cases of the worm have been reported outside of Australia

- NZ HERALD STAFF