Recently we heard about an virus / worm that takes advantage of Jailbroken iPhones that are SSH enabled to change the wallpaper. Fortunately for the iPhone community the iKee worm was just an experiment and no serious damage was done. But yes best to safeguard your jailbroken iPhone from this exploit.

The default root password to access the iPhone via SSH is ‘alpine’ and it is best if we change the same after jailbreaking the iPhone. A simple Cydia app called Mobile Terminal does the trick here. After installing MobileTerminal from Cydia you need to

1. enter the command ‘login’
2. login using the username: root and password: alpine
3. after you are logged in, enter the command ‘passwd’
4. now enter the new password (required to be input twice) and your SSH password would be updated

Though this may not protect you from all the possible exploits on the iPhone, its a good practice to plug the known holes before they result in serious damage.

Note: I tried this on firmware 3.1.2, works!