It’s unlikely that we’ll ever see vendors making media-coordinated product announcements for their latest anti-virus protection for scientific calculators.

However, that’s exactly the platform affected by new proof-of-concept malware that anti-virus researchers blogged about in the past week.

Now, before I ruin the summer vacation of every calculus teacher in America, let me clarify that the virus has no way of spreading through the air from one calculator to another – it’s harmless, and just proof-of-concept code at that.

Called Virus.TI.Tigraa.a by Kaspersky and TIOS/Tigraa by McAfee, the malware is less than 500 bytes and affects the Texas Instruments TI-89 graphing calculator with Motorola processor. It clears the screen and posts a message reading “t89.GAARA.”

It’s noteworthy not because of its destructiveness, but because it can attack another device with just enough memory to host a virus and no security to protect it.

“Of course, Tigraa.a is classic proof-of-concept code. It’ll only work on individual calculators, and can’t spread. But nevertheless, it’s created another entry in the roll call of potentially infectable devices.”
-Denis Nazarov, Kaspersky Lab’s Viruslist.com Analyst’s Diary.

“This incident would not be worth mentioning, but it prompts me to emphasize on important point. More and more mobile devices (pocket organizers, smartphones, internet tablets, calculators, etc.) receive enough computing power and not enough security features to create breeding ground for malicious code. We urge developers for all mobile devices to make necessary investment into securing the environment into securing the environment they create. Prevention is always better than a cure!”
- Igor Muttik, McAfee Avert Labs Blog