Nov 7, 2009
Dutch iPhone jailbreakers were in for an unpleasant surprise with a wallpaper giving them a message saying their iPhone has been hacked. As you can see he directed them to a website and asked for money to find out how to clean their iPhone. The hacker first wanted money but has changed his mind and has posted instructions on how to clean up anyways.
As this incident points out, chances are you haven’t protected your iPhone from such a hack either.
SSH (Secure Shell) enables you to get on to your iPhone just like you would on a Linux or Mac OS terminal. You can access files in your iPhone and do all kinds of stuff in it.
Unfortunately, all iPhones ship with the default ‘root’ user account with a password of ‘alpine’.
So, if you had SSH enabled anyone who finds your iPhone in a network can get into your iPhone with the root password. And this is bad. Let’s see how you can protect your iPhone.
- Go to Cydia
- Install Mobile Terminal app
- Open Terminal app
- Type passwd and hit enter
- Enter alpine for your old password and enter new password twice
- That’s it!
Just remember that anytime you restore your iPhone to factory settings, the root password is going to be set back to the default password. So, remember to change it again then.
On the Cydia app, it tells you to this:
1. Install and run Terminal
2. type su root (this makes you the admin)
3. Enter alpine for the password.
4. Type passwd
5. Type alpine for the current password
6. Type your new password in and confirm
7. Type mobile passwd
8. Change that
If I confused you just look on Cydia. It tells you exactly what you need to do. Karthik, you should update this post using the Cydia instructions.