Beware Of Cybercrime Related To Michael Jackson’s Death

Today is a sad day. I was a teenager in the eighties and grew up with Michael Jackson’s music blasting everywhere, it was a shock to hear about his untimely death.
Quickly brought back into reality, McAfee Avert Labs colleague Guilherme Venere posted a very timely warning that it won’t be long before cybercriminals will take advantage of the news to attempt to scam people into installing malicious software or give up personal information.
With the death of Jackson and also Farrah Fawcett being top of mind for a lot of people and many wanting to find out more details, this news cycle unfortunately makes a great hook for cybercrooks.
“Every time a disaster happens or news about some celebrity reaches the media, malware writers try to take advantage of it,” Venere writes. “The most common attack vector is email. Watch out for spam offering links to “news” or “pictures” of deceased celebrities. Most of the time, they will take you to Web sites offering advertisements for pharmacy products such as Viagra and Cialis or, even worse, will try to install malware on your machine!”
Scammers have also become adept at search engine optimization, or SEO. So when you’re looking for news using Google or Yahoo look for trustworthy sites in the search results.  Cybercrooks know how to trick search engines into serving up their malicious sites among the (continue reading...)