Rick Astley worm wriggles onto Apple iPhone

The iPhone has reached yet another milestone, although this one isn’t a particularly happy story for Apple: The phone’s first worm is alive and spreading.

The Ikee worm is circulating across Australia, the country where the hacker who released it resides.

However, the good news is that it isn’t actually a piece of malicious code. All Ikee does is change your wallpaper to a picture of eighties pop star Rick Astley.

In fact, the worm only works on “jail-broken” iPhones, in other words, phones which have been modified to run unauthorised software with SSH (Secure Shell) installed.

It will only infect a phone if the user hasn’t changed the default password that comes with the SSH utility.

According to a BBC report, the author claims he produced the worm to highlight security issues (users not changing the default password).

However, virus experts have pointed out that the cost of the bandwidth used to spread the worm will fall on infected iPhone users as well.

Also, they’re concerned the worm code could be modified to carry a far more malicious payload.

Such as playing an infinitely repeated loop of the chorus of Never Gonna Give You Up, perhaps. The very thought makes us shudder…