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Surprising Science

iPhone Worm

A more intrusive iPhone worm than the recent “Rick Astley” hack is worrying Apple as it puts sensitive information under threat of exploitation.
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“Another iPhone worm has been spotted in the wild. Unlike the previous exploitation, which merely changed a jailbroken iPhone’s wallpaper to a picture of Rick Astley of ‘Rickrolling’ fame, this new threat allows hackers to steal sensitive information. According to security firm Sophos, which wrote about the exploitation after a Dutch ISP spotted it late last week, the worm attacks jailbroken iPhone and iPod Touch devices only. The worm ‘uses command-and-control, like a traditional PC botnet,’ Sophos wrote in a blog post on Saturday to warn users about the exploit. ‘It configures two startup scripts, one to execute the worm on boot-up, and the other to create a connection to a Lithuanian server to upload stolen data and cede control to the bot master.’ Jailbreaking, which has been around for about two years, is a hack that enables iPhone and iPod Touch users to download applications unavailable through Apple’s App Store.”

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