Micheal Jackson's death has opened new avenues for hackers

Micheal Jackson's death has opened new avenues for hackers

As anticipated by the security researchers, hackers have started using pop sensation Michael Jackson’s death as a means to infect people's PCs with viruses and other such malware.
Ever since the news of Jackson’s death, a number of people are getting messages in their mailbox claiming to be breaking news from forums like CNN and the Los Angeles Times, reported many security companies like Sophos, Trend Micro and Symantec.
A couple of messages, which, so far, have appeared only in Spanish and Portuguese, include links that claim to take you to a video of Jackson in an ambulance or of his postmortem. These links, obviously, do no such things. Instead, they just give pop-up messages to the users asking them to upload or update latest Adobe Flash software.
This Flash update technique has now become a standard and much used hacker tactic, but it has worked very well in the past. For example, a few months back, a fake CNN news notification, led a number of users to hacked websites that asked the users to install fake Flash software. According to Trend Micro's analysis, the phony news e-mails try to trick users into downloading a bot Trojan that hijacks PCs, then awaits instructions from the botnet's controller.
"The trick here is that even if one tries the ‘Cancel/Close’ button, wanting to quit from downloading the file, the site will not close and continue to push the download of the virus infected file, leaving users with no choice but to let the malicious file downloaded into their system," says Argie Gallego of Trend.
Apart from this, there is a new malware-free scam that urges people donate to the bogus ‘Michael Jackson Organization’. An e-mail is doing the rounds which calls Jackson ‘a true humanitarian’ and through this the scammers ask people to send donations via money gram or western union.
Sophos' senior technology consultant, Graham Cluley, had predicted that malware attacks would soon begin to make use of Jackson’s demise. And it has come true. "I wouldn't be surprised to see hackers claiming that they have top-secret footage from the hospital, perhaps taken by the ambulance people, that then asks you to install a video codec," said Cluley.
Symantec has included many other scams on the to-be-expected-soon list, including spam that take users to fake antivirus software, Twitter tweets that include links to malicious sites and Facebook messages that fool users and make them to download ‘Koobface’, a worm that has infected Facebook and many other sites.

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