Rick Roll’D: Rick Astley iPhone Worm Eating Up Australia

According to the BBC, iPhone owners in Australia got quite a surprise this week when they found their phones displaying a wallpaper of Astley’s photograph with a message: “Ikee is never going to give you up.”

The Ikee in question is a worm that affects a jail-broken phones, where a user has removed Apple’s protection mechanisms to allow the phone to run any software.

“The creator of the worm has released full source code of the four existing variants of this worm,” wrote Mikko Hypponen of security firm F-secure.

“This means that there will quickly be more variants, and they might have nastier payload than just changing your wallpaper.”

Bad things. Far, far worse than any Rick Astley song!

Currently the worm has only been found in Australia, where the hacker, Ashley Towns, who wrote the program lives. The 21-year-old said he created the virus to raise the issue of security.

The blending of Rick Astley into Towns’ security awareness project is downright genius; what says be careful with your hand-held device better than Rick Astley?