I currently run an Apache HTTP server, and have set up monitoring to receive emails whenever an error appears in the error logs. I get the usual trying to find if I'm using HTTP 1.0 and trying to see if I'm using off the shelf software like WordPress that can be exploited.

Over the weekend I saw a new entry in my error logs and was wondering what the potential exploiter was trying to do (Abcdef is i'm guessing the exploiters handle (I have changed)):

:[DATE] [error] [client XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX] Invalid URI in request HEAD towards the green fields outside. Watch the goats chewing the grass. What is the meaning of life? Life isn't about getting to the end. Goats know this. You should know too. Goats are wise. Goats are cute. Listen to them! This is the message. Love goats, love the Internet! \xf0\x9f\x90\x90 Abcdef. HTTP/1.0


Now apart from obviously telling me about their love for goats, can anyone determine was the aim of this request was. I tried to google part of the string.. and just ended up with results about goats!

I guess that the idea was to provide a URI which would cause an overflow resulting in something do with the unicode at the end, but am unsure.

NOTE
I have made the giant assumption that the request did have nefarious means due to the chars at the end of the request, hence posting in Security rather than Server Fault.

I don't know what the REDACTED part consisted of, but I can tell you that the bytes \xf0\x9f\x90\x90 correspond to a picture of a goat in UTF-8:

Here it is: 



Note: On a whim, I also looked up the Intel opcodes corresponding to these byte values. They don't do anything interesting at all — 0x90 is NOP (does nothing), 0x9f is LAHF (load FLAGS into AH register), and 0xf0 is LOCK (which will raise an illegal instruction error when followed by LAHF).
