iPhone Hacker Rewarded With Cushy Job
by Blight Crusader
In an ideal world, malicious hackers would get jail time, and nothing else for their efforts. But, since online security began, some of them have been enticed by either private companies or government agencies to turn their skills towards trapping others of their kind. Or, at times, to just developing profitable software.
The recent small-time (his worm only reportedly infected 100 people) iPhone worm author Ashley Towns has now been hired by the Australian company Mogeneration, on the strength of his programming efforts in creating the “Ikee” worm. MacWorld is reporting that the 21-year-old responded to the job offer on his Twitter feed by saying: “Yey, I got the job. I’m now an iPhone application developer.”
For anyone with an interest in bot prevention, this is truly shocking news. Legitimate companies should shun this sort of talent, no matter how bright. Hackers should, quite simply, not be rewarded for their nefarious efforts. Wired has the whole story, complete with the entirely coincidental (yeah, I’m sure) less-benign worm which followed mere weeks later:
An Australian youth who created a worm that attacked iPhone users has been hired by a company that creates applications for the iPhone.
At least one security professional expressed displeasure that the malware author has been rewarded for his hack attack.
Ashley Towns, a 21-year-old student who goes by the names “Ikee” and “Ikex,” was hired this month as an iPhone application developer by the Australian firm Mogeneration, after the company learned about his worm, Towns revealed on his Twitter feed.
Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos, said the move sends the wrong message to hackers.
“What disheartens me is that Towns has shown no regret for what he did,” Cluley told TechWorld. “Now his utterly irresponsible behavior appears to have been rewarded. There are plenty of young coders out there who would not have acted so stupidly, and 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.”
Towns’ benign worm spread among Australian iPhones in early November and replaced the user’s wallpaper image with a photo of 1980s pop singer Rick Astley and the words “ikee is never going to give you up,” a reference to Astley’s hit song, “Never Gonna Give You Up.”
The worm affected only jailbroken iPhones whose owners installed SSH and neglected to change the default root password, “alpine.” Once a phone was infected, the worm searched for other vulnerable phones in the user’s mobile network but did little else.
A second, more malevolent worm, followed Towns’ creation about two weeks later, however. This one targeted the same vulnerability in jailbroken phones, but instead of simply changing the phone’s wallpaper it commandeered the phone into a botnet, changed the SSH default password on the phone from “alpine” to “ohshit” and attempted to steal the online banking credentials for customers of ING bank.
