TechSpark

News about the first trojan for the Mac-OSX based iPhone has been doing the rounds from the past few weeks. However, the trojan is a mild one. It targets users who are installing third party apps on their iPhone.

The package called “iPhone firmware 1.1.3 prep” aka “113 prep”, disguises itself as an important system upgrade before updating the phone to the iPhone’s latest update version 1.1.3 firmware. Once the users install this malicious package, the trojan appears to do nothing except for displaying the word “shoes” on the screen.

What the Trojan does is that it overwrites applications such as ‘Erica’s utilities’, a collection of command-line utilities for the mobile device, along with ‘OpenSSH’, an open-source encryption protocol.

While users attempt to get rid of the Trojan and try uninstalling it, the above mentioned applications also get deleted.

The risk in this Trojan’s case is minimal as it does not cause any significant harm to the iPhone. Those affected would simply need to re-install the deleted applications to get back on track.

Rumours say that a 11-year-old kid playing with XML files created the Trojan.

This will serve as warning for those who have opened their iPhones using a security hole in the system, and then installed unverified software without a second thought as to what they are doing, say security vendors.