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Mogeneration hires rickroll virus author

Ashley Towns, the Australian behind the ikee iPhone worm that replaced the background picture of insecure jailbroken iPhones, has reportedly been hired by Sydney company mogeneration.
Written by Chris Duckett, Contributor

Ashley Towns, the Australian behind the ikee iPhone worm that replaced the background picture of insecure jailbroken iPhones, has reportedly been hired by Sydney company mogeneration.

Astley iPhone background

Never gonna give you up
(Credit: Whirlpool ID, Batman)

The BBC reports a spokesperson for mogeneration said, "We interviewed Ashley, assessed him with our iPhone developer test — which he passed with flying colours — and we employed him today."

Mogeneration counts News Digital Media, Coastalwatch and GetPrice among its clients.

The news has drawn fire from Sophos security consultant Graham Cluley, who wrote in his 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."

"There are plenty of young coders out there who would not have acted so stupidly, are just as worthy of an opportunity inside a software development company, and are actually quite likely to be better coders than Towns who made a series of blunders with his code."

Towns rose to prominence when the ikee worm hit jailbroken iPhones earlier this month. The worm spread via users failing to change the default SSH root password. A botnet was subsequently added to the worm.

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