Now an internet worm is achieving what Apple has been unable to do -- punish those with jailbroken iPhones (phones freed of Apple's app restrictions).  Sophos, a leading security firm, appears to be the first to have investigated the amusing virus.  The virus, which "rickrolls" users, changing their wallpaper to an image of Rick Astley.  It appears to do little else other than spreading to other jailbroken iPhones in the user's contact list.

The worm can infect any jailbroken iPhone with SSH installed and an unchanged default password.  The password on jailbroken iPhones defaults to "alpine".  Users can change this by installing the MobileTerminal app, available from the Cydia undergound app store, and typing the command passwd.

While the Rick Astley worm appears to be mostly confined to Australia at this point, European iPhone users with jailbroken phones received a similar surprise last week.  A Dutch hacker sent numerous users with jailbroken iPhones a message, demanding they pay him 5 euros.  Like the Astley virus, the hacker took advantage of the fact that many users have jailbroken iPhones with unchanged passwords.  A "trivial" port discovery and login via the SSH protocol later, the hacker was able to post his ransom demand.

The hacker has since recanted and stopped asking people for Paypal payments, and has now posted free instructions of how to protect jailbroken iPhones.  While these incidents may have been mere annoyances, its seems only a matter of time before an actual malicious virus is unleashed on the jailbroken iPhone community.