Malicious Spam Luring Victims with Claims of Celebrity Deaths

Strange stories of celebrities' deaths resulting from plane crashes or car accidents have suddenly erupted in the spam ring. The intention of distributing such false news is to spread viruses using HTML or zipped attachments. This is one more in a series of recent virus attacks seen in the last few weeks. We had written about one of the attacks in a recent Security Response Blog post. This is an old trick of using celebrity names to lure recipients into opening malicious URLs or attachments.
In one of the campaigns seen, spammers are using subject lines showing that a celebrity has died. Examples include:

Beyonce Knowles died

Bon Jovi died

Brad Pitt died

Cameron Diaz died

David Beckham died

Gwen Stefani died

Jay-Z died

Jennifer Aniston died

Jennifer Lopez died

Johnny Depp died

Justin Timberlake died

Kanye West died

Miley Cyrus died

Nicole Kidman died

Ronaldinho died

Tiger Woods died

Tom Cruise died

In the message it adds that the celebrity has died along with 34 other people when their plane carrying the group on a trip crashed into a mountainside while approaching the airport. For further details, recipients are asked to open the malicious attachment. In another example, we observed that the subject lines were changed to show that the celebrities had a fatal car crash and they were killed in that accident.
Sample image of the message:

We could find the same celebrity names used in the subject lines as (continue reading...)