How to Remove (Fix) iPhone Worm – ‘iKee’

If your iPhone is jailbroken and if you see the below image as your home screen, it is time to tighten your seat belt security and remove iKee worm and fix your jailbroken iPhone.

A hacker who calls himself/herself iKex has recently created what apparently is the first iPhone worm, and it’s currently infecting jailbroken iPhones across Australia. The attacks, which researchers say are the world’s first iPhone worm in the wild, target jailbroken iPhones that have SSH software installed and keep Apple’s default root password of “alpine.”

In addition to showing a well-coiffed picture of Astley, the new wallpaper displays the message “ikee is never going to give you up,” a play on Astley’s saccharine addled 1987 hit “Never Gonna Give You Up.” Once the iKee worm changes your wallpaper it tries to install itself on other jailbroken iPhones on the network. If you have been affected, luckily there is no harm done as this virus was more of an experiment than anything else.

This is how apparently the iKee worm operates:
Once an iPhone has been infected by ikee, it automatically starts searching for other iPhone’s on the cellular network that use the root:alpine username/password combination. Once it finds another vulnerable iPhone, it installs itself and begins the process again and this goes on like a nuclear chain reaction. ikee virus will disable SSH access on your iPhone and will change the background image to that of “Rick Astley” as can be seen in the screenshot above.

How to Prevent your iPhone from iKee Worm (and other similar worms in future)?
To protect your jailbroken iPhone or iPod touch from ikee worm attack or any other similar attacks in the future, you must change your default SSH password (that is “alphine“) now.

How to Remove iKee Worm and Change Default SSH Password in your jailbroken iPhone?
- Go to Cydia and search for MobileTerminal app and then install it on your iPhone. You can directly install it from here though. Once you have successfully installed MobileTerminal, reboot your iPhone.

- Start MobileTerminal app and type the following command to change the root password

login

Press enter. And then type

root

as your login and ‘alpine‘ as your current root password. After logging in, Type

passwd

Press enter.

- It will now prompt you to enter a new password (twice). Simply enter your desired new password again.

That is it. It should all be fine and now your iPhone should be free from ikee worm. Cheers

Let us hear how it worked for you.