If you Jailbroke and installed OpenSSH at some point, you might be at risk.
It's nothing new really and today the problem is widely diminished by the fact that OpenSSH is optional when you jailbreak, nevertheless many people are still running it and a couple of jailbreakers found out about the risks the hard way. That's just another risk related to using public wireless...
Hundreds of little hackers around the world hack into unsecure jailbroken iPhone everyday and it can turn pretty badly. The worst that usually happens is an unusable iPhone or someone making a copy of all your confidential data.
This time though a Dutch hacker came up with a more creative solution and started sending messages to the insecure iPhones he would find and ask for a €5 PayPal ransom.
So if your iPhone/iPod is jailbroken and you installed OpenSSH you should consider uninstalling it or at least turning it off when you don't use it. It's easy to do with utilities like BossPrefs and it will really save you some battery life.
Another option is to change the default password, to do this :
- install Mobile Terminal from Cydia
- launch it and type "passwd root" without the brackets
- Pick a new password
- type "passwd mobile" without the brackets
- Pick a new password
- type "reboot" and wait for you iPhone to restart, that's it
[via Gizmodo]
