'Turkey' worm looks for Solaris Telnet flaw

A new worm targeting a flaw in Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Solaris 10 OS delivers crude artsy payloads, including a drawing of a turkey in ASCII text.

The use of an ASCII drawing by a hacker is "a bit old school," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos PLC.

The worm -- called Unix/Froot-A or Wanuk -- takes advantage of a zero-day flaw that was patched by Sun three days after exploit code was published last month.

The vulnerability lies within the Telnet daemon, a process that runs in the background and waits for another Telnet client to connect, which can allow a hacker to log in without a password. An attacker could eventually gain complete control over the machine.

The worm scans port 23 to see if Telnet is running, then sends data to exploit the vulnerability, Cluley said. Infected computers then scan for more vulnerable machines, he said.

The drawings -- some of which are more offensive than the turkey -- can appear on the monitors of other machines connected to the infected machine, Cluley said.

Sophos hasn't heard of any companies being affected. Users of Solaris are advised to apply the patch and disable Telnet, Cluley said.