The beginning of this week, saw the coming of the first ever iPhone worm. The worm out in the wild as iKee (The one that changes the wallpaper to that of Rick Astley – of the rickrolling fame!) is actually a wrapper built around iPhone/Privacy.A that runs silently in the background without ever letting the user know that it is running. What does the worm do?
Well it goes after the personal data stored on your iPhone which includes email, contacts, SMS, Calendars, Photos etc. So if you have Jailbreak’ed your iPhone, you have to be concerned now.
Also the worm doesn’t need to be running on an infected device, the attacker could instead load it onto a Computer in a public network and scan for iPhone’s connected to the same network that are deemed to be vulnerable.
The attack vector is simply the Jailbroken iPhone, which is what you need to secure if you are running a Jailbroken iPhone. Since the iPhone runs on the trusted Unix Based Filesystem the fix is actually easier than it seems and you lose out on nothing with regards to the Jailbreak functionality.
So how do we do it? We just change the root password of iPhone to prevent hackers from getting access to the precious personal data on your iPhone. It’ll hard take you a couple of minutes but will save you a lot of trouble later.
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I was recently at a Hackfest conducted by IIT Madras, during Shaastra ‘09. During the Hackfest I was taught how to develop Jetpacks, a project by Mozilla Labs. The Aim of Jetpacks is to make Addon development for Firefox a lot more simpler than what it already is now.
Mozilla Labs Jetpack – Intro & Tutorial from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.
For those of you not aware with Jetpack is all about. Jetpack is a Mozilla Labs project that enables anyone who knows HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to create powerful Firefox addons. The goal of Jetpacks is to allow anyone who can build a Web site to participate in making the Web a better place to work, communicate and play.
Jetpack Gallery is for Jetpacks in the same way as Mozilla Addons is for Firefox. Till today people installing Jetpacks had to either depend on the Wiki page maintained by Mozilla. However with the launch of the Gallery the floodgates have been opened and I expect to see some interesting uses of Jetpacks in the days to come.
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