Hoots mon, there's a worm in my printer!

WORM-SNIFFERS, at SophosLabs, say they've found a wiggly specimen that likes to send a picture of an owl to attached network printers.

The Hoots-A worm is written in Visual Basic and spreads via network shares, Sohpos said.

It attempts to send a graphical image of an owl bearing the legend "O RLY?" to a number of print queues. "O RLY?", said Sophos experts, is Internet slang for "Oh really?"

Sophos spokesman Graham Cluley, reckons the worm isn't the work of a profssional virus writer - not that we're aware of where you can apply for such a position

"It appears this malware was written for a specific organisation, by someone who had inside knowledge of their IT infrastructure," he said.

Cluley said his firm had only received reports of the malware from one customer, but wouldn't tell us who it was. µ