First iPhone Worm Creator Gets an App Developer Job

Ashley Towns, the 21 year old man responsible for the “first ever” iPhone worm, announced on Twitter that he has landed a job as an application developer at Australian company mogeneration. If you remember, he created a worm dubbed “Ikee” that was not dangerous at all. Said worm would just change the infected iPhone or iPod Touch’s background image to one of 80′s pop star Rick Astley. The worm took advantage of the vulnerability that arises when iPhone users install an SSH client and refrain from changing the default password.

Not happy at all with mogeneration’s decisition, Graham Cluley, a senior security consultant at Sophos, expressed the following:

“Don’t get me wrong – I don’t think virus writers shouldn’t be allowed to rehabilitate and do something worthwhile with their lives. But 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. Will Towns be offering a token $5 compensation to all those he infected for the inconvenience he caused? I doubt it.”

Towns has expressed he never expected any legal consequences, and never assumed the worm would go as far as it did. “We interviewed Ashley, assessed him with our iPhone developer test – which he passed with flying colours – and we employed him today,” said a spokesperson for mogeneration.

What do you think, does Ashley Towns deserve that developer job after what he did?