Thread: PCs hit by Michael Jackson malware

30 June 2009
PCs hit by Michael Jackson malware
By Gregg Keizer, Computerworld (US)

It didn't take long. Security researchers are reporting that hackers have begun to use the death of pop star Michael Jackson to infect people's PCs, just as they predicted.

Starting late last week and continuing today, messages posing as breaking news alerts from the likes of CNN and the Los Angeles Times have been reaching users' mailboxes, said several security companies, including Sophos, Symantec and Trend Micro.

Some of the messages, which have appeared only in Spanish and Portuguese so far, include links claiming to lead to video of Jackson in an ambulance, or even of his body postmortem. The links, of course, take users to nothing of the kind. Instead, they force a pop-up message that instructs the user to update their copy of Adobe's Flash.

The Flash update ploy may be a now-standard hacker tactic, but it's worked extremely well in the past. Last summer, for example, fake CNN.com news notifications led massive numbers of users to thousands of hacked websites that served up fake Flash software.

According to Trend Micro's analysis, the fake news emails try to trick users into downloading a bot Trojan that hijacks PCs, then awaits instructions from the botnet's controller.

Full Story: Techworld.com - PCs hit by Michael Jackson malware

That is terrible. I really dislike that stuff...That is exactly why I do not click links, for any reason...I will type it in myself. I tell my family and friends the exact same thing so that they dont turn out to be a victim.

Originally Posted by uberhost

Full Story: Techworld.com - PCs hit by Michael Jackson malware

Thanks for sharing this, i will warn my nearest and dearest.. this is really insane..

Yes i saw in the online news that Google is wondering that some thing new thread come as michael jackson in net.
Google stop providing result for that query.
It was very interesting that in only one day there were too many searches were done with one name.

Wow. I didn't know about this one yet. Thanks for sharing!

this is unbelievable that people use every worlds tragedy to spread their malware.