For those of you running a jailbroken iPhone in Europe and Australia, be on the lookout for a new worm that just popped up.  The good people over at Macworld.com have reported that their source who has seem the worm out in it’s natural habitat.  I am going to try and stumble through this and let you know what the worm is up to.

First things first, CHANGE YOUR ROOT ACCOUNT PASSWORD.  Okay, so now to the dirty deeds of this new worm.  It compromises the phone, then replaces the phone’s copy of the SSH remote login software, changes the root password so that you cannot keep it from doing it’s thing without completely wiping your phone out.  It then skims your SMS database.  Sounds semi-innocent, but then it checks in with home base via the network and then it runs a piece of software that searches your friends and family to see if there are any phones that would be susceptible to an attack.  It has the power to upload the SMS database to the people that put this little gem out, and also download other files over the network, which could mean that it could “learn” new ways of attacking your things.

Also, there are reports that persons trying to log into a particular Dutch bank have been rerouted to a fake site that asks for their login information.  Remember the part where the worm reports and downloads things to it’s creators?  Yeah, that is where this comes into play.  Be careful out there.

The biggest tell tale sign of an attack is severe battery drain.  This is caused by the attack on the SSH software that will have your phone computing continuously.  Some users have seen the battery drain disrupt things so much that they just took it upon themselves to wipe the phone without knowing that they even had a worm.

This one is ugly, so I say again, change that root password!  Macworld.com has a tutorial that can get you through this process.