Ikee worm writer rewarded with job

The young Australian fellow that wrote the Ikee worm that began the series of events that is now creating havoc on so many jailbroken iPhones has now been rewarded with a job.

Ashley Towns, a 21-year-old nerd that still lives at home with his parents, says he wrote the Ikee worm to point out to iPhone users that their poor password security habits would get them in trouble. Of course, in doing so, he also insured that the owners of those phones would eventually be nailed by the hackers that followed his lead, using his exploit to make their way onto jailbroken iPhones and do real harm to them, perhaps even hijacking them for use as bots in a hacker’s net.

The original worm written by Towns did not cause any palpable harm to its victims, according to a TopNews article, though it was a major annoyance to these that were infected. But by publishing his exploit code, Towns made sure that other miscreants would follow his lead. When they did so, those imitating hackers have ruined days or weeks of the lives of a large number of iPhone users. That the infected phones had to have been jailbroken to be susceptible is probably some sort of Karmic justice in and of itself.

But there is no justice whatsoever in the fact that Towns has been rewarded for his electronic vandalism with a developer’s job at Australian iPhone app developer Mogeneration. That development is like rewarding the fellow that throws a brick through all the windshields in your neighborhood with a nice job with a  company that installs glass. The sort of thing that young Towns is apparently good at falls into the same category as disfiguring automobiles by scraping paint off them with your keys. That is not a reason to reward someone; that’s a reason for a few months in jail. Towns and  Mogeneration, shame on you both.

• 

Related posts:

1. Worm infects iPhones
2. Apple’s latest update does not stop quite all jailbreakers
3. Top 10 reasons NOT to jailbreak your iPhone 4
4. Change to iPhone 3GS foils unlockers – for now
5. Malicious website can lock up iPhone/iPod Touch and crash Safari