Ikee iPhone worm creator lands app development job

Stephen Withers
Friday, 27 November 2009 01:28

Your IT - Mobility

Now there are widespread reports that Towns has been hired as an iPhone application developer by mogeneration.

mogeneration, which claims to be "Australia's leading iPhone development company" has a client list that includes News Corp.

Cluley was clearly unimpressed by the news: "it jars with me that Towns has shown no regret for what he did, and that now his utterly irresponsible behaviour appears to have been rewarded. Will Towns be offering a token $5 compensation to all those he infected for the inconvenience he caused? I doubt it.

"There are plenty of young coders out there who would not have acted so stupidly, are just as worthy of an opportunity inside a software development company, and are actually quite likely to be better coders than Towns who made a series of blunders with his code."

At the time Ikee was spreading, mogeneration officials said jailbreaking "removes a level of safety that Apple imposed in order to make the iPhone reliable - most of all to ensure that an application does not disrupt the primary function of the iPhone - to make voice calls. It's akin to taking the lock off the front door or disabling your cars [sic] airbag, you can do without them but they were there for a reason."

mogeneration estimated that between 2 and 3% of Australian iPhones (or up to 25,000) have been jailbroken, based on information from the analytics built into the company's apps.

How many were actually affected by Ikee? No one knows for sure. Towns said his iPhone infected around 100, but any estimate of how far it spread from there would be little more than an educated guess.