Mobile devices aren’t usually the first targets you might think of when it comes to viruses, worms and Trojans. In fact, you could probably be forgiven for not knowing they exist at all. But I think that the recent popularity of smart phones with the consumer market may bring with it an interest in programming malware for those devices, as well.

And for a hacker who wants to make his or her mark on the consumer smart phone world, what better place to start than with the little machine that helped start the whole craze? Though certainly not the first smart phone, Apple’s iPhone was arguably the first smart phone that people found a reason to embrace for their personal use. And it’s sold millions for Apple.

Chet Wisniewski of security provider Sophos posted Saturday about a new worm that affects the iPhone. An Internet service provider in the Netherlands identified the malware. The worm executes itself when you turn on your device, and it also takes data from the iPhone or iPod and sends it to a server in Lithuania.  It only affects those iPod Touches and iPhones that have been jailbroken, or unlocked to allow non-Apple-approved software on them. Attacks have been detected on ISPs around the world, including T-Mobile in many countries, UPC in the Netherlands and Optus in Australia.

The malware assigns each iPod or iPhone a unique number so the hackers who wrote the software can control it as they would with a zombie computer. It also looks for SMS-based authentication systems, the type used by financial institutions for mobile banking purposes. From what Wisniewski said, the worm operates faster on a WiFi network than it does on the 3G network; if your device is infected, you’re likely to see the battery run down more quickly than usual, due to its high network traffic.

If you’ve got a jailbroken iPhone or iPod Touch and suspect that something’s awry, Wisniewski said the best solution at this time would be to revert to an earlier Apple firmware, which will un-jailbreak the device. But it will also prevent the worm from running.

Will mobile malware become a normal happenstance? Will other operating systems, such as Google’s Android, have to fend off similar problems? Time will tell. In the meantime, take a look at these articles for more on these and other related topics:

How Hackers Work
How Cell-phone Viruses Work
How Zombie Computers Work