Spammers Love a Good Tragedy

February, 2010

Spammers, being opportunists, love to take advantage of a tragedy. The recent rash of celebrity deaths has provided plenty of examples. The same-day deaths of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett in June, as well as those of Natasha Richardson and Patrick Swayze, in September, were quickly exploited by spammers. Within 24 hours of the news, each celebrity spam campaign emerged, chronicling "the last few hours" of their lives with videos on YouTube and other sites. Unfortunately, these videos were typically either Trojan downloaders or browser helper objects.

Another emerging tactic leverages search engines and social-media tools such as Twitter to poison search results by providing links to sites that deliver malware. In these instances spammers will create a topic or a website and artificially generate enough interest in them so that their content quickly moves up in popularity. The appearance of these topics near the top of search results will create more interest on the part of curious users, who are interested in reading more about the topic, thus justifying its high rankings.

Once users start visiting these sites, a number of events, none of which is good for anyone except cybercriminals, can take place. For example, some results returned when users searched for information on Patrick Swayze's funeral led to a "scareware" page that would told users their PCs were infected with multiple viruses.

Credit David Marcus
McAfee Labs