iPhone Company Employs Worm Author
Ashley Town, 21-year-old creator of the iPhone Ikee worm, today announced that he had taken up the job of an app developer with Australian company.
The company ‘Mogeneration’, is Australia’s leading iPhone development company and has decided to employ the hacker who developed the Ikee worm that was targeted at jail-broken iPhones and substitutes the victims’ iPhone wallpaper to that of a celebrity ‘Rick Astley’.
The code was indeed full of bugs as earlier versions of the worm usually copied wall paper of previous victim before juxtaposing it with that of Astley. Despite his pranks, Rick Astley has not been arrested neither has he been accused of the said offence.
The hullaballoo surrounding Towns’ worm actually focused on gaping hole in jail-broken iPhones and this was ex post facto exploited by the far more dangerous duh worm, which turns infected devices to mobile botnet drones.
As anticipated, the security world isn’t too satisfied with the new development. Senior Technology Consultant at Sophos, Graham Cluley, commented on his blog “There are plenty of young coders out there who would not have acted so stupidly, are just as worthy of an opportunity inside a software development company, and are actually quite likely to be better coders than Towns who made a series of blunders with his code.”
He also said “I don’t think virus writers shouldn’t be allowed to rehabilitate and do something worthwhile with their lives,” Cluley said. “But it jars with me that Towns has shown no regret for what he did, and that now his utterly irresponsible behaviour appears to have been rewarded. Will Towns be offering a token $5 compensation to all those he infected for the inconvenience he caused? I doubt it.”
