The Iphone Blog

Two programmers with TippingPoint’s Digital Vaccine Group created a proof of concept botnet, which showed that smartphones are just as susceptible to the attacks of black hat hackers as anyone else. The pair created a “weather” app called WeatherFist, and distributed it through Android marketplace and on jailbroken iPhones. While in this form, it was relatively benign, just gathering the users location data and phone-numbers, at the recent RSA Conference they showed that it could easily transition it into a more traditional botnet, which would steal their information and spread spam.

I think it’s an important point to remember that iPhones, like traditional computers, can be usurped by people with less than honorable intentions. If you’ve jailbroken and are picking up random apps over Cydia, remember that literally anything can be there, and you have no idea of the intentions of its creators.

[via Sophos]

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