First Trojan for iPhone Appears!!!

News about the first Trojan for the Mac OS X-based iPhone has been doing the rounds since Saturday. However, the Trojan is believed to be mild one.It targets iPhone users who have modified their phone to install third-party utilities.

The malicious package, called “iPhone firmware 1.1.3 prep” aka “113 prep”, disguises itself as an important system upgrade supposedly needed before upgrading to version 1.1.3 of Apple’s firmware. Once users install it on their iPhone, the Trojan appears to do nothing more than display the word “shoes” on the screen.

What the Trojan does is that it overwrites applications such as ‘Erica’s utilities’, a collection of command-line utilities for the mobile device, along with ‘OpenSSH’, an open-source encryption protocol.

While users attempt to get rid of the Trojan and try uninstalling it, the above mentioned applications also get deleted.

The risk in this Trojan’s case is minimal as it does not cause any significant harm to the iPhone. Those affected would simply need to re-install the deleted applications to get back on track.

Apparently, a 11-year-old kid playing with XML files created the Trojan.

Hopefully, this will serve as warning for those who have opened their iPhones using a security hole in the system, and then installed unverified software without a second thought as to what they are doing, say security vendors.


Via Techtree