Jail-Broken iPhones Vulnerable to Rick-Rolls

It was recently reported that jail-broken iPhone users in Australia were getting hit by a virus that was changing their desktop backgrounds to a picture of Rick Astley with an ominous message that “ikee is never going to give you up”.  While the attack may seem humorous to the outside observer, it is probably pretty unnerving if the iPhone in question is yours.  This raises the question of how secure you can possibly be using a phone that has the words “jail-broken” in front of it anyway.  How much security do people possibly think they will get using software and programs designed to run on a platform that has had its end user license agreement violated to start with.

I don’t expect any sort of media response from Apple about this attack, but I do expect that they won’t be happy about the coverage.  For a company that works so hard to control their image, it is surely a major annoyance to have a story like this hit the press.  Even though the phones in question have been jail-broken and are no longer supported by Apple, the fact that every story will say “Apple’s iPhone” will be damaging.

I would fully expect the next round of iPhone software updates to include something that will break the jail break software.  They’ve done it in the past, I would expect them to do it again – soon.