iPHONE LATEST: FIRST iPHONE WORM APPEARS

Reports are emerging that the first worm written for Apple's iPhone has been unleashed and is infecting phones in Australia. However, the worm, known as Ikee, is only a threat to users who have jaibroken their phones to let them run unauthorized software, security experts say.

In fact, Ikee doesn't do anything particularly bad -- it changes the victim's wallpaper to a photograph of 80s singer Rick Astley and then seeks out other phones to infect -- but it could be modified to do something more dangerous such as stealing sensitive information from the iPhone.

The worm does not affect most iPhone users; only those with jailbroken iPhones that are running a Unix utility called SSH (Secure Shell) with the iPhone's default password, "alpine," still in use. SSH lets someone connect to the iPhone remotely over the Internet, so installing this software with the default password in place is akin to adding an unlocked back-door to the device. It doesn't affect users who use the phone in conjunction with Network Address Translation (NAT), a popular networking technology that lets many users share the same IP address.

The worm writer is Mr. Ashley Towns, a 21 year-old unemployed programmer from Wollogong, Australia. He said Sunday in an instant-message interview. "It was supposed to be a small prank I definitely wasn't expecting it to get as far as it did," he said. Once the worm adds the Rick Astley wallpaper, it disables the iPhone's SSH daemon and then looks around on the Internet for other vulnerable iPhones to infect. Tricking victims into playing a video or looking at a picture of Rick Astley -- best known for his hit "Never Gonna Give You Up" -- is a popular Internet prank called Rickrolling.

It's not clear how many people have been affected by the worm, but the Worm creator said that his phone alone infected about 100 other devices though there has been no confirmed reports of the worm spreading outside of Australia. News of the worm first started spreading several days ago, when users on an Australian technology discussion board complained that their iPhone wallpaper had been changed without authorization.

iPhone users may be pissed, but Apple may not mind. The iPhone's creator has been trying to put an end to jailbreaking for years due to its security and performance problems.