Rick Astley iPhone Worm Found in Australia

Just because you have an iPhone and live in Australia doesn’t mean you’re safe from ’80s pop star Rick Astley.

According to the BBC, iPhone owners in Australia got quite a surprise this week when they found their phones displaying a wallpaper of Astley’s photograph with a message: “Ikee is never going to give you up.”

The Ikee in question is a worm that affects a jail-broken phones, where a user has removed Apple’s protection mechanisms to allow the phone to run any software.

“The creator of the worm has released full source code of the four existing variants of this worm,” wrote Mikko Hypponen of security firm F-secure.

“This means that there will quickly be more variants, and they might have nastier payload than just changing your wallpaper.”

As yet, Ikee is not destructive, but let’s think of this Rick Astley-meets-Apple technology episode as an example of what could happen if you tinker with your iPhone and it becomes jail-broken.

Bad things. Far, far worse than any Rick Astley song!

Right now, the worm has only been found in Australia, where the hacker, Ashley Towns, who wrote the program lives. The 21-year-old said he created the virus to raise the issue of security.

The blending of Rick Astley into Towns’ security awareness project is downright genius; what says be careful with your hand-held device better than Rick Astley?

Astley has been nothing short of an internet phenomenon ever since the act of ‘Rickrolling’ swept through the world of pop culture. To get ‘Rickrolled’ is when you’re tricked into clicking on a seemingly normal link, only to end up on a page showing a video of Astley’s 1987 hit song “Never gonna give you up.” (If you haven’t already, get this guy’s Greatest Hits. Easy to forget Astley had other great songs besides The One.)

No word from Astley about this iPhone worm/security test hubbub, which shouldn’t be surprising since the guy still probably cannot believe what the hell is going on with this whole Rickrolling madness.

But so not to freak out iPhone users, The ikee worm only affects jailbroken iPhones, which represent a small percentage of iPhones on the market.

So right now you’re safe – as long as you don’t try to jack up your iPhone. And if you do, well then it’s Rick Astley time.

Question: Will iPhone owners now purposefully hack their own iPhones in order to try and self-rickroll themselves with the Ikee worm?

Honestly, if you were going to create the world’s first iPhone worm, how could you not include Rick Astley into your devilish scheme?