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Change iPhone’s Root Password After Jailbreaking It

November 8th, 2009 by Dev Team in Uncategorized

If you’re one of the many who are jailbreaking your iPhone to get options such as tethering, make sure you change the root access password once you do.
In addition to your possibly getting Rick-Rolled

Your jailbroken phone could possibly be held for ransom

If you’ve never changed the default device password, now’s the time. Here’s how:

The app to use on the iPhone is called MobileTerminal and it’s available for free in the Cydia store.

Once you have MobileTerminal installed, launch it and you should see a prompt saying this or similar:

iPhoneName: ~ Mobile$

  • At that prompt, type: passwd
  • You’ll be prompted for the ‘old’ (current) password for the mobile user.  Enter this as the old password: alpine
  • You’ll then be prompted to enter the new password – so just type in your desired new password.  Use good password principles if possible (long and stong).  You will not see characters appearing on the screen as you type – that’s normal, not a concern.
  • You’ll then be prompted to re-enter the new password.  Do that.
  • You should then be returned to the Mobile$ prompt that you started on when opening the MobileTerminal app.  There’s no success message to say the password was changed – but if you’re returned to the prompt and do not get an error, the change was successful.  And you’re done with change for the mobile account.
  • The second primary admin account for the iPhone is called root – so now you need to change that as well.
  • Type this to switch to the root user: login root
  • You’ll be prompted for the root user’s current password.  Enter this: alpine
  • Type this to start the password change routine again: passwd
  • Enter the old password for root (it is ‘alpine’, same as for the mobile user) and enter your desired new password twice, just as you did for the mobile account

One Response to ' Change iPhone’s Root Password After Jailbreaking It '

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  1. Dave said,

    on August 23rd, 2010 at 7:56 pm

    Thanks! That saved my ass. —

    –DS

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