Prank iPhone?

I received an e-mail from my friend Maged Boulos yesterday which contained the following warning:

'The first Malware for the iPhone has appeared. It began to appear a few days ago as a package named "iPhone firmware 1.1.3 prep" and was described as "An important system update. Install this before updating to the new 1.1.3 firmware." During the installation, the package overwrites some other applications including OpenSSH and "Erica's Utilities"—a collection of command line tools for the iPhone. If the user uninstalls the fake 1.1.3 prep package, these other apps are also removed. No explicitly malicious actions are taken though; all the user need do is to reinstall the lost apps.'

This application problem is probably an unintended side-effect, and the fake package appears to be a prank, intended to be harmless. But it does show the potential for malware to do damage to iPhones and the need for users to be cautious.

Well, it's very nice of the malware writers to think of us iPhone users. We would feel left out if they hadn't created some special viruses just for us. If I ever meet one though, I will cheerfully dispatch them prematurely to the place all virus writers are destined to end up...

And get this.... the University's intelligent anti-spam software 'cleverly' identified Maged's e-mail as 'spam', so I didn't see it immediately, as it was zapped into my 'to delete' file.