The virus is designed to run on the programmable TI-89 graphing calculator which has a Motorola 68x00 as the CPU. In the best tradition of the old school virus authors the virus is a mere 492 bytes in size, and simply clears the screen and prints a message on infected devices. The virus has been given various names as is the tradition in the Anti-Virus industry but McAfee is calling it ‘TOS/Tigraa’.

The TI-89 is in essence a computer running calculator software, it is a powerful device in the calculator world. Well there isn’t Anti-Virus software for calculators yet, but detection has been added to several PC based Anti-Virus products to attempt to detect it before it gets downloaded to the device. However, this will not stop calculator to calculator propagation should something similar actually make it into the wild.

We should stress that is a proof of concept sample of malware targeting the TI-89, but it raises yet another possible device that could get targeted if someone wanted to.

As a little side note to the story the source code for this little bit of malware has been released by the author of the proof of concept here.

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