BANGALORE, INDIA: Hollywood actress Brittany Murphy's unfortunate death over the weekend has given the cyber criminals yet another chance to push 'scareware' or fake anti-virus software, warn experts.
They have said that the inevitable web searches lead Internet users to some potentially unsafe sights and, according to Finnish security firm F-Secure, this is, of course, a search engine optimization (SEO) attack.
Users who click on a poisoned search result link will be redirected to a website that will display a scare message trying to panic users into downloading rogue AV software, said F-Secure.
When a surfer clicks on an infected search-result link, specially created pages carrying the scareware appear, which say there is a supposed malware infection. The pages then offer to clean the malware from the PC for a fee. And when you pay online, your credit card details will be naturally stolen.
According to Trend Micro, searching for keywords like "brittany murphy's death" on Google resulted in at least two suspicious URLs. It said users should rely only on trusted news sites for reports on Murphy's death to prevent system infection.
During 2009, cybercriminals have targeted the deaths of celebrities like Patrick Swayze and Michael Jackson with similar scams.
BANGALORE, INDIA: Hollywood actress Brittany Murphy's unfortunate death over the weekend has given the cyber criminals yet another chance to push 'scareware' or fake anti-virus software, warn experts.
They have said that the inevitable web searches lead Internet users to some potentially unsafe sights and, according to Finnish security firm F-Secure, this is, of course, a search engine optimization (SEO) attack.
Users who click on a poisoned search result link will be redirected to a website that will display a scare message trying to panic users into downloading rogue AV software, said F-Secure.
When a surfer clicks on an infected search-result link, specially created pages carrying the scareware appear, which say there is a supposed malware infection. The pages then offer to clean the malware from the PC for a fee. And when you pay online, your credit card details will be naturally stolen.
According to Trend Micro, searching for keywords like "brittany murphy's death" on Google resulted in at least two suspicious URLs. It said users should rely only on trusted news sites for reports on Murphy's death to prevent system infection.
During 2009, cybercriminals have targeted the deaths of celebrities like Patrick Swayze and Michael Jackson with similar scams.
http://www.ciol.com/Global-News/News-Reports/Dangerously-searching-Britt...
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