Adam's Atoms
What do Ashley Towns, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Kevin Mitnick have in common?
26/11/09 12:57
Earlier this month, jailbroken iPhones in Australia were hit with the first iPhone-based worm. The so-called Ikee worm changed the wallpaper on infected iPhones to a picture of Rick Astley below the text “ikee is never going to give you up”. This alternative form of Rickrolling [don’t worry, that’s a link to Wikipedia] was perpetrated by a 21-year old Australian hacker who goes by the name Ikee, but whose real name is Ashley Towns.
Towns stated that his motivation for releasing the worm in the wild was to point out the vulnerability of jalibroken iPhones running SSH with the default password unchanged. He urged owners of jailbroken iPhones to change the default password to avoid more dangerous attacks in the future based upon this same technique.
But that’s not the end of the story. News broke today that the 21-year-old author of this worm has now been hired by mogeneration, a company which describes itself as “Australia’s leading iPhone development company.” Reaction to this news has been decidedly negative, with people railing against the fact that Towns is now being rewarded for bad behavior in spite of the fact that he has been unapologetic about the damage caused by his worm and his violation of the “hacker ethic”.
I certainly do not condone Towns releasing his worm into the wild. Certainly he exposed a hole that owners of jailbroken iPhones should be glad to close. However, I am not upset by the fact that Towns has since landed a job doing iPhone development. I would hope that mogeneration is hiring him for his talents as a developer and not for the press that may result from his hiring. More importantly, however, I would much rather see creative and talented developers creating great new applications than wasting their time on malware. Hopefully Towns will do so now.
Reading about Towns reminds me of Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs who spent time in the 1970s using their own Blue boxes to make prank phone calls (including one to the Pope in Vatican City while pretending to be Henry Kissinger). Wozniak and Jobs of course went on to pioneer the personal computer and Wozniak continues to talk and write about his Blue box and other exploits. I’m also reminded of Kevin Mitnick, the hacker who served time in prison for hacking various computer systems over several years in the 1990s. Mitnick now operates his own security firm and is the author several of books on related topics.
Like Wozniak, Towns has not apologized for his acts. However, unlike Mitnick, Towns does not appear to be directly leveraging his experience with activity deemed criminal to make money. Hopefully we’ll see some positive things from Towns soon, though I do hope he simply fades into the sunset.
Towns stated that his motivation for releasing the worm in the wild was to point out the vulnerability of jalibroken iPhones running SSH with the default password unchanged. He urged owners of jailbroken iPhones to change the default password to avoid more dangerous attacks in the future based upon this same technique.
But that’s not the end of the story. News broke today that the 21-year-old author of this worm has now been hired by mogeneration, a company which describes itself as “Australia’s leading iPhone development company.” Reaction to this news has been decidedly negative, with people railing against the fact that Towns is now being rewarded for bad behavior in spite of the fact that he has been unapologetic about the damage caused by his worm and his violation of the “hacker ethic”.
I certainly do not condone Towns releasing his worm into the wild. Certainly he exposed a hole that owners of jailbroken iPhones should be glad to close. However, I am not upset by the fact that Towns has since landed a job doing iPhone development. I would hope that mogeneration is hiring him for his talents as a developer and not for the press that may result from his hiring. More importantly, however, I would much rather see creative and talented developers creating great new applications than wasting their time on malware. Hopefully Towns will do so now.
Reading about Towns reminds me of Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs who spent time in the 1970s using their own Blue boxes to make prank phone calls (including one to the Pope in Vatican City while pretending to be Henry Kissinger). Wozniak and Jobs of course went on to pioneer the personal computer and Wozniak continues to talk and write about his Blue box and other exploits. I’m also reminded of Kevin Mitnick, the hacker who served time in prison for hacking various computer systems over several years in the 1990s. Mitnick now operates his own security firm and is the author several of books on related topics.
Like Wozniak, Towns has not apologized for his acts. However, unlike Mitnick, Towns does not appear to be directly leveraging his experience with activity deemed criminal to make money. Hopefully we’ll see some positive things from Towns soon, though I do hope he simply fades into the sunset.