Doh! Double Doh! Everyone knows Homer Simpson, the oddball father on the animated FOX television show 'The Simpsons'. Well, apparently Homer had an AOL e-mail account and, after five years of inactivity, the account has suddenly gone live again. The registered AOL account went live through an away message on AIM (AOL Instant Messanger), which took unsuspecting users adding Homer as an AIM buddy straight on to hosted Malware. The Malware is designed to add the infected computer to the Kimya Botnet.
Doh!! That is all... (Images: Matt Groening)
"Homer's e-mail address chunkylover53@aol.com, as seen on [“The Dad Who Knew Too Little”], was registered by writer-producer Matt Selman, who also replied to e-mails from fans testing it," commented Simpsons writer Al Jean in a related New York Post article from 2003, as highlighted by snpp.com. "He logged in the night that the episode aired and it was immediately filled with the maximum number of responses. He's tried to answer every one of them and then as soon as he answers a hundred, a hundred more pop in."
It is interesting that the attackers managed to take over the account. Here is an example of one of the responses that Matt Selman sent out, sourced from PlanetClaire.org:
“Dear Nerd, I didn't even know the internet was on computers these days, let alone some kind of electric mail dealie. Please send all future letters (and beer) to: 642 Evergreen Terrace, Springfield USA then a zip code. Praise Jebus! -- Homer Simpson.”
Now, Chunkylover53 is active again, and his away messages are shady, shifty-eye dog shady, offering a file named 'kimya.exe' or 'Episode349.exe'. The away messages all look like the following, according to various blogs and forums:
“[REMOVED]/d2/kimya.exe, click that and click RUN (or RUN from current location) or save to desktop and double click, it's a *new* internet-only exclusive Simpson's episode that is only being released to the internet fans! Enjoy!”
“CHECK OUT THE NEW SIMPSONS EPISODE THAT WE’RE ONLY RELEASING TO THE INTERNET AIM FANS! BE THE FIRST TO EXPERIENCE THE MAGIC BY CLICKING THE FOLLOWING LINK: [REMOVED] SELECT RUN, (or RUN from current location) OR save to DESKTOP and DOUBLE CLICK!
ENJOY, AND SEND US YOUR FEEDBACK!”
The file is about 100-200KB in size, the samples are almost all covered by the various detection engines. Some people, mostly loyal series fans, have been taken for a ride by attempting to watch the 'video'. Sadly, AIM users would be well advised to block Homer, and remember not to trust animated strangers that send you suspicious executables.
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