Security Blog

July 17, 2009
Michael Jackson Spam Rises From the Grave

Michael Jackson's unexpected passing has shocked the world and generated a new wave of "Michael Mania". Everywhere you go, people are talking about it. It's all over TV, radio, and the Internet. Even I have pulled out my old stash of Michael Jackson CDs and gave Thriller another good listen.

As we've mentioned before in this blog, hot news items such as this one are often exploited by spammers and other cyber criminals. Sadly, MJ is no exception. Riding on this wave of public interest, emails claiming Michael Jackson being murdered, having exclusive video footage, or emails with Michael Jackson's songs or pictures began to surface minutes after his death. These emails contain attachments and bad URLs that had malware. These were all used in attempt to infect user PCs and to extract information from them for criminal purposes.

Another method also used was fake Michael Jackson related blogs. Users would see many pop-up services when browsing to these fake blog sites pretending to talk about Michael Jackson. While the users are reading the fake blogs, malicious scripts would attack the reader's machine in the background.

As if Michael Jackson's death hasn't already been exploited enough by the media, cyber criminals also felt the need to jump in on the exploitation. So, fake emails, fake videos, fake pictures, fake URLs, fake blogs, fake nose (sorry), there are so many smoke and mirrors regarding this subject floating around that one really needs to be careful what they click on. Otherwise your machine might be the one that's paralyzed.

Posted by: Pete at 5:26 PM
Categories: General , Malware , Phishing , Spam , Worms

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Michael Jackson Spam Rises From the Grave

Michael Jackson's unexpected passing has shocked the world and generated a new wave of "Michael Mania". Everywhere you go, people are talking about it. It's all over TV, radio, and the Internet. Even I have pulled out my old stash of Michael Jackson CDs and gave Thriller another good listen.

As we've mentioned before in this blog, hot news items such as this one are often exploited by spammers and other cyber criminals. Sadly, MJ is no exception. Riding on this wave of public interest, emails claiming Michael Jackson being murdered, having exclusive video footage, or emails with Michael Jackson's songs or pictures began to surface minutes after his death. These emails contain attachments and bad URLs that had malware. These were all used in attempt to infect user PCs and to extract information from them for criminal purposes.

Another method also used was fake Michael Jackson related blogs. Users would see many pop-up services when browsing to these fake blog sites pretending to talk about Michael Jackson. While the users are reading the fake blogs, malicious scripts would attack the reader's machine in the background.

As if Michael Jackson's death hasn't already been exploited enough by the media, cyber criminals also felt the need to jump in on the exploitation. So, fake emails, fake videos, fake pictures, fake URLs, fake blogs, fake nose (sorry), there are so many smoke and mirrors regarding this subject floating around that one really needs to be careful what they click on. Otherwise your machine might be the one that's paralyzed.

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