Worm infiltrates computer, disables CPU fan, causes overheating

If you have both cats and dirt you may want to be wary of a new type of worm that's infecting computers across Great Britain -- or computer, anyway. It's called an earthworm, and one of the five-inch variety stealthily found its way into the laptop of one Mark Taylor. He began receiving overheating errors and took his machine to a technician who promptly found the unfortunate invertebrate wedged in the cooling fan, slowly crisping thanks to the system's heat. Taylor thinks one of his cats dug up the worm, brought it inside, and then the poor thing crawled through one of the cooling vents on his notebook to flee its pursuer. We're not sure how it got separated from its ultra-high-tech-indestructible-super-space-cyber-suit, but surely somewhere Queen Slug-for-a-Butt is laughing.

[Via Switched]

[Rena Posted Feb 26th 2009 12:48PM]

Hell, this worm can infect your machine without it even being on.

[Raul7 Posted Feb 26th 2009 11:37AM]

Nice title Engadget! When I first read it, I thought you were talking about the Windows usual (a virus :p).

[Gregory Pius Posted Feb 26th 2009 11:41AM]

Don't these people know that there's no profit in killing computers anymore? Shouldn't it litter your desktop with popups and hijack your browser? Or steal your passwords? or turn your machine into a zombie? PC-killer viruses are, like, so Eighties, man.

[Shunnabunich Posted Feb 26th 2009 2:30PM]

If actual earthworms start doing THAT, I think the human race is pretty well screwed. We'll have to turn to the robots to hunt down the worms before our society completely collapses, then they, in turn, will enslave us.

[Gregory Pius Posted Feb 26th 2009 11:49AM]

A-ha. This'll learn me to read these Engadget posts more carefully--it was an -actual- worm.

"They call me Dr. Worm... Good morning, how are you, I'm Dr. Worm..."

[(Unverified) Posted Feb 26th 2009 12:02PM]

mr. jingles : " I HAZ WORMS AND I WILL TAKE OVER YOUR COMPUTER!! muahahah "

lol i seriously thot i had to scan my computer after i read that title -____-"

[(Unverified) Posted Feb 26th 2009 12:29PM]

Yeah i do find this very funny as an US Navy Aegis Computer Fire Control Technician. The term computer bug was actually coined at my current base, Naval Support Facilty Dahlgren's Computation and Anaysis Building decades ago. Moth found in system. Computer debugged.

[(Unverified) Posted Feb 26th 2009 2:42PM]

I think earthworms are suicidal in nature. I have a bunch of dead earthworm in my driveway. I don't know what reason, but they come out of the comfortable ground and grass and crawl onto the driveway where they're cooked to crisp or killed by a bunch of ants. Sometime if I see them I kind of try to put them back on the grassy part.

[LonelyTV Posted Feb 26th 2009 2:35PM]

This happened to a co-worker of mine. She brought me her laptop saying that her keyboard had melted and that the computer would no longer turn on. When I opened up the machine I saw a beetle lodged inside the CPU fan. Apparently after that the CPU got hot enough to melt the keyboard and itself.

[(Unverified) Posted Feb 26th 2009 3:33PM]

thanks for the laugh, Engadget!

[(Unverified) Posted Feb 26th 2009 4:47PM]

Kitteh hax0r is doing it wrong.

[(Unverified) Posted Feb 26th 2009 8:06PM]

lqtm... oh, kind of deceptive... from the standpoint of a computer nerd.

[joshuaw Posted Feb 26th 2009 5:26PM]

Am I the only one who thinks that guy in the picture looks like a young Charles Whidmore?