Earlier this week, we reported that the first iPhone worm had been created. It was called “ikee,” and all it did was change the default wallpaper on devices to an image of Rick Astley with “ikee is never going to give you up” printed across the top. It was relatively harmless, if annoying, and the hacker responsible claimed that it was more of a warning than anything else.

Hopefully many heeded that warning, since now a new virus has surfaced that uses the same M.O. as ikee, but that has a much more malicious intent and effect. Specifically, the new malware mines personal data from your device, using the very same exploit ikee revealed earlier in the week.

The new worm, dubbed “iPhone/Privacy.A” by digital security firm Intego, affects only jailbroken iPhones, and grabs things from your device like address book contacts, text messages, photos, music, video, calendar entries and email messages. Basically, almost anywhere it can look for sensitive data, it will. The virus doesn’t seem to be able to access information stored by other applications on your iPhone, like password managers, but if you’re affected, the only safe course of action is a full wipe and restore.

Theoretically, according to iPhone security researcher Charlie Miller speaking to Computerworld, attacks based on the same exploit could do more than just mine data. Running up your phone bill, sending out bulk text messages and spamming your contacts are all well within the realm of possibility. Miller goes on to describe how easy it would be for a hacker to infect a device:

This could easily be installed on a computer on display in a retail store, which could then scan all iPhones that pass within the reach of its network. Or a hacker could sit in an Internet café and let his computer scan all iPhones that come within the range of the Wi-Fi network in search of data.

In order to secure your device against this kind of attack, there are a few options. First, change the default SSH password if you haven’t already. So far, that appears to be the easiest way to foil attempts to infiltrate your jailbroken device. The best way to prevent this and any kind of future attack along the same lines, however, is to not jailbreak your device in the first place, or to restore it to factory settings if you’ve already jailbroken. Of course, for many who use their devices with carriers who don’t officially offer the iPhone, that isn’t an option.

Miller suggested that Apple may want to consider re-engineering its security measures to account for jailbroken devices, but as that would mean tacitly acknowledging and even accepting a practice it stridently disapproves of, I think the best bet for jailbreakers is just to shut down all SSH access, if possible.

The first iPhone worm has been discovered. It comes to us via Australia, and appears to be limited to that country for now, although it has the potential to spread. It also stars Rick Astley, so to speak. The work changes the iPhone’s wallpaper to an image of the 1980s pop singer, who’s enjoyed a recent resurgence thanks to the Rick-rolling Internet phenomenon.

The worm has the ability to break into jailbroken iPhones only. Even if you’ve jailbroken, you still aren’t vulnerable unless you’ve also installed SSH, and not changed the default password after doing so. As a result, only a small fraction of the larger iPhone community is probably susceptible to the “ikee virus,” as it is called in its own source code.

Still, it shows that as the platform matures and becomes more widespread, it also becomes the target of more malicious attacks. Most hackers, like any businesspeople, are interested in the bottom line, and part of that involves targeting the largest group of people possible. With millions of users worldwide, the iPhone is definitely an appealing mark. ikee’s creator, a hacker calling himself “ikex,” cites a different explanation for this particular worm’s creation:

Why?: Boredom, because i found it so stupid the fact that on my initial scan of my 3G optus range i found 27 hosts running SSH daemons, i could access 26 of them with root:alpine. Doesn’t anyone RTFM anymore?

In the case of this worm, which only changes the background wallpaper to the Astley photo with the slogan, “ikee is never going to give you up” across the top, Graham Cluley of SophosLabs suggests it’s really only an experiment:

The source code is littered with comments from the author suggesting the worm has been written as an experiment. One of the comments berates affected users for not following instructions when installing SSH, because if they had changed the default password the worm would not have been able to infect them.

While not dangerous in and of itself (it actually sort of provides a service by reminding users to take precautions), it could open the door for similar programs with less innocuous payloads. Hopefully, jailbreak users will learn from the experience and be prepared if someone more sinister tries to do the same thing again.

It’ll be interesting to see whether Apple latches onto this as a means to further decry the evils of jailbreak. If it leads to more serious exploits, it definitely would constitute a good reason to stay on the straight and narrow. In either case, expect to see more security concerns surrounding the iPhone as it continues its commercial success.

Isn’t it the dream of every slacker to sit in bed, or at the beach, and make it appear like you are putting a full day at the office? Well, there’s an app for that.

Enter the variety of remote control apps for the iPhone, which let you operate your desktop Mac from your iPhone as if you were sitting in front of it. Some of these apps use the common VNC protocol to allow remote control, and others use their own proprietary methods. All of them will let you control your Mac (or a PC) from your iPhone.

Jaadu ($24.99)

Jaadu is the most polished and powerful of all the iPhone remote control clients. It offers SSH encrypted VNC, which is a key feature if you connect to your Mac via public Wi-Fi networks, although the SSH encryption in Jaadu doesn’t operate with Snow Leopard Macs (Jugari promises a fix soon).

The actual remote control is quite intuitive. By default, control is a combination of moving the mouse pointer and sliding the desktop behind it.  You pinch with two fingers to zoom in and out of the remote screen, and the iPhone’s soft keyboard can be used for typing. Jaadu provides a pop-up box for using modifier keys, as well as keys that don’t exist on the iPhone keyboard. It works well for limited typing, but you would not want to write an essay this way. Jaadu includes nice extras such as clipboard transfer and support for a wide variety of VNC servers, including the built-in Mac OS screensharing.  Unfortunately, you do need to modify and configure your firewall to allow SSH, but Jaadu does have software that will attempt to automatically configure it for you.

LogMeIn Ignition ($29.99)

LogMeIn’s primary feature is that it requires zero configuration of the computer being controlled, and it works securely and automatically across all kinds of networks (other remote control clients usually require manual router configuration). The software works with LogMeIn’s suite of Mac and Windows remote control products, and is a polished and powerful piece of commercial software.

After installation, you are presented with a list of computers to which you have access, and that’s all you need to configure it. The actual remote control isn’t as smooth or intuitive as Jaadu.  Your two basic modes are either the background moves or the mouse moves. Similar to Jaadu, LogMeIn has a pop-up keyboard and modifier keys.   Personally, I use this program as my preferred method of remote control because I can easily control a fleet of Macs and PCs.

iSSH ($4.99)

iSSH, like Jaadu, offers integrated encryption of VNC sessions; however, the remote control functionality seems to be thrown in as an afterthought in what is actually a very powerful system administrators’ tool, offering all kinds of remote access including SSH, X11 and telnet.

Similar to other remote control clients, you move the mouse by sliding your finger across the phone’s screen. A very nice feature iSSH offers is a “transparent” view of the keyboard, so you can type while still seeing as much of the remote screen as possible. Actual performance seemed a bit slower than LogMeIn or Jaadu, and the app appears less stable, occasionally crashing. The crashing aside, it’s overall an excellent value.

MochaVNC ($5.99) and MochaVNC Lite (Free)

The Lite version of Mocha is absolutely worthless; it works OK as a viewer, but you can’t do any normal typing, as the developers do not support the Mac’s modifier keys, such as “command,” unless you buy the full version. Neither version offers integrated encryption, and the performance was slow and unreliable. At a dollar more than the more polished and feature-rich iSSH, MochaVNC is not a good value.

RemoteTap ($4.99)

RemoteTap is a “VNC-like” application, although it doesn’t actually use a standard VNC server. Instead, you download the free RemoteTap preference pane on the computer you want to control. This preference pane is much more powerful than normal VNC servers, offering support for advanced features like command macros, multi-touch gestures, and direct access to Spaces, Front Row, and application launching.

RemoteTap’s remote control works very well, with a unique “magnifying glass” interface that expands the area of the remote Mac screen without the need for a lot of manual zooming in and out. Overall, RemoteTap is very polished and feature rich, but it is missing support for standard VNC or encryption, so it is not a good choice for those with a mix of Mac and PCs or who need to connect over the Internet.

RDM+ Remote Desktop ($9.99)

RDM+ Remote Desktop works in a similar manner to LogMeIn, utilizing a central server to enable remote control of Mac and PC desktops from an iPhone without requiring manual configuration of routers or firewalls. You install a small piece of software on the Mac or PC you want to control, and then purchase and install the app on your iPhone. RDM+ Remote Desktop provides the usual basic remote control features; you can pan, zoom, click and drag on the remote computer as well as type text. However, the controls on the iPhone felt awkward and were not as intuitive to use as many of the other remote control apps.

All of these apps have their plusses and minuses. The best value for the money is probably iSSH. The most polished commercial-grade software is LogMeIn. Jaadu is simply the most powerful pure VNC client, and RemoteTap offers some unique Mac-only functionality for LAN use in a home or office. MochaLite works well as a free viewer if you just need very basic functionality.  Which ever way you go, these apps will let you access the desktop of your Mac from anywhere, so go ahead and stay in bed and convince your boss you are sitting at the office.

Just this week I was posing the question of where are all the (no-jailbreak-required) ssh/terminal apps for the iPhone? While not the best platform for such a tool (the keyboard would – and does, as you will see – eat up some serious real estate), the platform has enough processing power to handle such an app and there are definitely times when it is handy to get ultra-portable access to your systems.

As if they were listening for my request, Instant Cocoa released pTerm, which provides support for SSH, Telnet and taw TCP client connections from your iPhone. pTerm is based on PuTTY, one of the more stable & well-known ssh client suites (OS X users can grab that via some ports).

You start new sessions by choosing from the Connections panel:

To get an entry on that panel, you use a very basic configuration screen to enter a display name for the connection, the host (or IP address) and the port you wish to connect on:

For ssh connections, you will receive a warning about host keys that you should be familiar with if you’ve used ssh before (the developers presented this in a great way as it would have been much less iPhone-like to deal with this from within the terminal prompt):

The terminal sessions work in both landscape and portrait modes,

and the xterm emulation worked with “top” (which auto-updates) and “pine” (a terminal-based e-mail reader that does quite a bit of screen manipulation).

The Instant Cocoa devs understood the need for the CTRL key (yay!) and version 1.1 adds support for ESC as well (kinda useful if you choose to use “vi” in the session). Version 1.1 also fixes some instability issues and adds full-screen support (as you can see, the keyboard eats up the majority of the real-estate). They are working on allowing users to customize the terminal sizes/colors, adjust TCP settings, provide support for port forwarding and include ways to use more easily use terminal-specific keys.

Since pTerm is based on PuTTY, we may be able to expect to see significant feature enhancements. I would personally like to see the ability to use RSA/DSA keys and the ability to log sessions (which would require some way to get that log off the iPhone). It would also be great to keep multiple sessions open simultaneously (it’s in the works) and switch between them. Some folks might like the ability to cache credentials or at least the username associated with ssh sessions (not recommended, but it’s a personal-risk-decision one can make). For RAW socket connections, having a way to record and playback keystrokes or define a set of strings to paste into the session would be great for rapid testing of web/internet services.

For me, pTerm is definitely worth $4.99USD, especially if that covers major updates for a while. I’ve only tested it over EDGE, but it worked flawlessly, even with the latency.

If you use pTerm or have some feature requests for it, drop a note in the comments!

Magnetk – makers of SftpDrive for Windows – have brought their secure, remote filesystem magic to OS X with version 1.0 of ExpanDrive.

If you have a blog/site hosted on any flavor of Linux or BSD (including OS X) or do any amount of cross-platform management or development then you know how useful ssh is for speedy & secure command-line access from the Terminal. The advent of MacFUSE on OS X brought sshfs to the Mac application landscape, though it can be slow and cryptic to setup for the average user.

ExpanDrive simplifies access to these remote filesystems via an unobtrusive menubar icon and straightforward user interface. Simply open up the ExpanDrive Manager:

and enter in your connection info. You can leave the password field blank if you already have ssh public/private keys defined and configured your servers appropriately. A simple double-click of the drive in the list view mounts the filesystem and it behaves just like any AFP, SMB or attached disk.

I’m fairly mobile, moving from AT&T 3G to Wi-Fi to Ethernet throughout the day and I’ve been able to keep ExpanDrive filesystems mounted across all these transitions without the dreaded “spinning death ball” that is usually associated with the Finder and network mounts. While some Mac apps – TextWrangler and ImageWell being two that I use – have native support for SFTP, ExpanDrive provides for universal access across all applications and makes it simple to reliably integrate remote storage operations into your workflow.

If you poke around the application bundle (you do poke around application bundles, right?), you’ll find that ExpanDrive was developed with Python as a foundation, fully demonstrating that you do not need to be an Objective-C maven to create great Mac software.

ExpanDrive has an introductory price of $29.00USD, is a Universal application and runs on OS X 10.4.1 (Tiger) or higher.

If you give it a try, drop a note in the forum or comments, especially if you are using it with any type of high-speed NAS configuration.