Homer Simpson: Malicious Hacker?

AS QUITE a few Simpsons fans could tell you, Homer's AOL account name is ChunkyLover53. He revealed it in the Season 14 (2003) episode "The Dad Who Knew Too Little," in which he hired a private detective to find out Lisa's likes and dislikes.

According to The Simpsons Archive:

Homer's e-mail address [...] was registered by writer-producer Matt Selman, who also replied to e-mails from fans testing it. "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," Al Jean told the New York Post in January 2003.

More than five years on, Homer Simpson has reappeared on AIM. (Yes, his handle has been in my AIM contacts all this time.) But there's something odd about his sudden reappearance. His profile reads:

[Download link redacted.] 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: [Download link redacted.]

SELECT RUN, (or RUN from current location) OR save to DESKTOP and DOUBLE CLICK!

An Internet-only Simpsons episode? Sounds great -- if only those CAPS didn't look so dodgy. (Granted, the English isn't riddled with the usual errors and typos that amount to sirens and flashing lights screaming, "Hoax!") And the second clue? The download URL points to a free file hosting site with the target "kimya.exe," a 150kb Windows executable file, hardly the location, size, and format for an entire Simpsons episode.

A Google search for "kimya.exe" turned up just two unhelpful entries (well, now this entry is one of the results). But having downloaded the file to OS X -- being sure not to let it anywhere near my virtual XP partition in VMWare Fusion -- and scanned it with ClamXAV, it is in fact hiding the Trojan Truko-431.

So a word of warning to all Simpsons fans with Homer's AOL handle still in their AIM buddy list: Beware of geeks bearing gifts.