First the MTV awards, now the iPhone... what's next for Rick Astley? World domination?

Cheshire born and bred crooner Rick Astley has been (unintentionally we assume) laying siege to headlines all over the world today, after becoming 'the face' of the first ever worm to infect Apple's iPhone.

Still Rick-rolling along

Ikee apparently infects 'jail-broken' phones, those that have been tampered with to remove Apple's factory protection, and changes the screen wallpaper to a picture of Astley at the height of his pomp.

A message noting 'ikee is never going to give you up' also appears on screen.

Apart from the fact that your new wallpaper might get you widely ridiculed, the program is said to be harmless.

So far ikee has only appeared in Australia, where hacker Ashley Towns has admitted to writing the program to raise the issue of security on hacked devices.

It can be removed by deleting certain files and changing the phone's password.

Experts are now claiming that more harmful worms could follow in ikee's footsteps... one that changes your ring tone to a Big Fun ditty, perhaps?

Now that would be dangerous.

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Comments (5)

2  By Nigel Hughes , on 09-11-2009 18:06 Rick is from Newton-le-willows, which is not in Cheshire. This fact is not crucial to the story I admit. Report

4  By Apposing , on 09-11-2009 23:42 It only infects the iPhone IF your device is jailbroken and IF you've installed SSH and IF you've not changed your default root password to something other than "alpine". Although I'm sure 90% of people who write articles on this will ignore all these points. Report