Updated September 2026 — a 2010 jailbreak-era tutorial, kept as a period piece together with the security story it belongs to. Do not follow it on a modern device.
SSH into a jailbroken iPhone with WinSCP (2010)
First make sure you have SSH and BSD Subsystem installed from Installer. If you can’t find the source, reboot or turn Wi-Fi off and back on.
Next get WinSCP and find your iPhone’s IP by going to (on your iPhone) Settings > Wi-Fi > “your selected Wi-Fi” > look under IP Address. Connect to your iPhone using WinSCP (user: root, password: alpine). Change the file protocol to SCP.
Once OpenSSH is installed your phone will be vulnerable to all users in a specific Wi-Fi subnet. Make sure to use the WinSCP terminal window and run this command to change the password:
passwd root
type in password, press return
type it in again, press returnTo avoid frequent logouts, remember to change Settings → General → Auto-Lock (5 minutes or Never).
Why this mattered: the iKee worm
This was not trivia. In 2009 the iKee worm spread across jailbroken iPhones in exactly this way: the phones ran an SSH server, and every device shipped with the same default root password, alpine. The worm simply connected, copied itself, and moved on to the next address. Changing that password was the single most important thing a jailbroken phone’s owner could do — which is why posts like this existed. (See LWN’s post-mortem, “What lessons can be learned from the iPhone worms?“.)
Modern jailbreaks no longer install an SSH daemon by default, and the “alpine” default is long gone, so the 2010 steps no longer apply as written. The underlying lesson never expired: any device that runs a network service with a default credential is one worm away from being owned. It is the same lesson as unchanged router admin passwords and default printer or IoT credentials — close the hole before someone else does it for you.