The creator of the iPhone rickroll malware—twenty-one-year-old Ashley Towns from Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia—admitted last week to local media that his little publicity stunt has earned him both career opportunities and the ire of millions of iPhone users since the release of his Apple iPhone worm last weekend.

Towns reported to the news outlets following his story that he had gotten both job offers and threats to his life (just how serious these threats are is anyone's guess) just a day after he was revealed to be the inventor of what's been considered as the very first generation of iPhone malware. Towns developed a malicious code that modified the screen wallpaper of the infected iPhone devices to a picture of eighties pop star and Internet meme sensation Rick Astley.

The worm specifically targeted jailbroken iPhones, which are phones that have been customized so that they have the ability to run non-Apple-permitted software (because of these circumstances, one might conjecture that Towns was actually working for Apple by creating a worm that could "punish" those who had the audacity of buying modified iPhones).

Only Australian users with SSH-installed, jailbroken iPhones on the Optus network were affected by the purported ikee worm made by Towns. Nevertheless, scores of perhaps hundreds of users with nonstandard, modified iPhones were victimized by the practical joke malware. Just like the creator of the first-ever Internet worm (Robert Morris's Morris Worm), Towns described his foray into the mobile device malware front as an experiment gone horribly wrong. He didn't think about any legal repercussions when he went about his rather questionable feat, and he certainly didn't expect the worm to spread as far as it did.

The network administration graduate student had been under intense and hateful public scrutiny over the past week, so explaining his deeds to his family and friends were the least of his worries. He revealed to a local NSW newspaper that a lot of random strangers had been making death threats at him, and someone was even able to figure out what his cellphone number was and published it over the Internet. However, he had an upside of getting an iPhone application developer to grant him a job interview for his dubious contribution to the world of mobile gadget security.