Apple’s iPhone has a worm, 3 million at risk

With what must have been startling rapidity what started out as a proof of concept exploit of jailbroken iphones has turned into a security nightmare for iPhone owners, with the worm, called iPhone/Privacy.A having the ability to allow hackers to connect to any jailbroken iPhone, act silently and retrieve e-mail messages, SMS messages, calendar appointments, contacts, photos, music files, videos, along with any other data recorded by by iPhone apps.

An estimated 3.2 million iPhones are vulnerable to this exploit, and while mitigating steps, such as changing the root password, is available, this is said to break many applications designed for jailbroken iPhones which are written to take advantage of a hardcoded password. As a mitigating step it also of course leaves those iPhones vulnerable to dictionary attacks commonly used to attack machines on the internet.

Jailbraking iPhones is relatively common, as it is the only way to access needed functionality like multi-tasking and desirable features such as customizing the user interface.

At present there are no antivirus applications for the iPhone.

Read more at Intego here.