Who would have thought it? The much-loved television character Homer Simpson, who has been a household name for almost 20 years, has been unmasked as a hacker, and botnet pusher, trying to persuade unsuspecting fans to install the Kimya bot on to their computers.

Or at least that is what you’d at first think if you were one of The Simpsons fans gullible enough to fall for the latest attempt at hacking unsuspecting victims. Victims who thought they were downloading an exclusive Web episode of The Simpsons, only to find their PC was then at the hands of criminals.

The story starts back in January 2002, when Homer Simpson revealed his email address in an episode entitled The Dad Who Knew Too Little. His address was shown on screen as chunkylover53@aol.com, which prompted many thousands of fans to try it out to see if they could actually contact the animated yellow character on a fictional TV show. Yes, I know, but these people do actually exist.

Luckily for these very deluded hopeful individuals, a writer on the show by the name of Matt Selman had thought ahead, and registered the email address in the real world. He then answered as many as he could, with hundreds of Simpsons fans receiving a reply from Homer.

As well as emailing the address, many fans added Chunkylover53 to their AIM friends list. They were disappointed when Homer never signed in, and the address was all but forgotten about, until it suddenly became active again in the last few days. Unfortunately, rather than Matt Groening’s creation suddenly coming to life and coming online, the address had been hacked, and was being cleverly utilised to install malware on people’s computers.

According to Spyware Guide, in the ‘online but away’ message which suddenly appeared on AIM, was an invitation to download an exclusive new Internet-only episode of The Simpsons. Only the address didn’t take those loyal and desperate fans to a video, but to a download file of Kimya.exe.

Fans then found their computers were infected with rootkit technology, and added to a botnet of Turkish origin. Which isn’t nearly as good as an exclusive episode of The Simpsons.

The message has apparently changed a few times since this first one, with other download links, and even a dating website replacing it. But all of them result in the same thing, the user having their security compromised by hackers of unknown origin.

It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of being offered something exclusive, or free, or both, but unless you’re absolutely sure that what you are clicking on is genuine, you’re better off leaving well alone. And remembering that cartoon characters are fictional, and don’t really have email addresses… Doh!

Related:

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Entry was posted on Sunday, July 13th, 2008 at 7:15 pm under Bizarre, Hacking, Internet, Malware, Opinion.  Print This Post

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