The creator of the firstiPhone worm, Ashley Towns, has announced on Twitter
that Sydney-based software firm Mogeneration has offered him a job
after his headline-grabbing antics.
The Ikee worm changed the wallpaper on infected iPhones to an
image of 1980s pop star Rick Astley.
This inconvenienced hundreds of users in Australia, who had to
restore the normal functioning of their handsets, and used up
valuable data packages to spread to other iPhone users.
The 21-year-old Towns claims he created the worm to raise
awareness about the security risks of using "jailbroken" iPhones
modified to run any application and work with any network.
But in creating Ikee, Towns also provided the template for the
more dangerous
Duh worm which hijacks iPhones for a botnet and steals
financial information, said Graham Cluley, technology consultant
for Sophos, in a
posting on his
award-winning blog.
"It jars with me that Towns has shown no regret for what he did,
and that now his utterly irresponsible behaviour appears to have
been rewarded," he wrote.
Cluley said writing viruses and worms is "not cool" and should
not be a route to employment.
However, Towns is not the first to get a job after shooting to
prominence for creating a piece of malware.
In 2007,
Li Jun, the Chinese creator of a virus that changed icons to a
picture of a panda burning joss-sticks, was employed with a £66,000
salary by a company infected by his malware.
And five years ago,
Sven Jaschan, who authored the widespread
Netsky and Sasser worms, caused outrage in the IT community
when he was hired by a German security firm.