The British security firm Sophos has recently discovered a rather peculiar virus. Once it infiltrates a computer, it sends a series of print commands for an image of an owl with the caption ‘O RLY?’ (Oh, really?) to the printing system.
The owl image distributed by Hoots.A. (Source: Sophos)
The Hoots.A virus is a classic example of the type of harmful program from the late 1980s, when virus creators made them for entertainment rather than profit. According to Sophos, this worm appears to be the product of a disgruntled employee aiming to congest the computer systems of a certain company, but he did not realize how quickly Hoots.A would spread.
“It’s hard to understand why the author wanted to print an image of an owl“, commented Graham Cluley, a consultant at Sophos. “Hoots.A is not a ‘professional’ virus. Most hackers would encrypt their programs to avoid detection, but Hoots.A does not. It is even written in Visual Basic, which is rarely used today for writing viruses.”
Nonetheless, Hoots.A has demonstrated that printers can also become targets of Trojans, and Sophos reminds companies to manage their machines more strictly.
T.N.
