The Inevitable Michael Jackson Spam
by Blight Crusader
It’s as inevitable as A-B-C. Easy as 1-2-3. Simple as do-re-mi.
So to speak.
Michael Jackson’s untimely death has unleashed a flood of spam looking to capitalize upon the intense worldwide interest right now in the self-styled King of Pop. Since his death was truly unexpected, the first wave of this flood was fairly benign, as spam goes. Computer World reports on the early efforts of spammers:
Hackers are using Michael Jackson’s death to try and trick people into disclosing personal details, says Sophos.
According to the security vendor, less than 24 hours after the death of the 50-year-old singer, web users have received emails that claim to contain ‘vital information’ about his death.
Sophos says that although the messages don’t contain any malicious attachments or links to infected websites, if the recipient replies, spammers can harvest their email address for potential use in ID fraud.
“Hackers are never slow to jump upon the coattails of breaking news stories in their attempts to spread spam and malware. Cybercriminals have no respect for taste and decency. The only thing they are interested in is making some money for themselves, and turning other computer users’ lives into a misery,” said Graham Cluley of Sophos. “With so many people going onto the net to follow the latest developments in the Michael Jackson story, we wouldn’t be surprised at all to see further attempts to trick people. No-one at the moment would bet any money on hackers not chasing after this story by spamming out malicious links claiming to include exclusive footage of Jackson’s last moments, or disguising themselves as breaking news from the likes of the BBC.”
News of Michael Jackson’s death caused a massive surge in internet traffic last night, which caused Google to temporarily crash.
That last bit is particularly impressive. If I dropped dead tomorrow, I can absolutely guarantee that Google would not crash as a result, for instance.
USA Today, of all places, has a fairly in-depth article from the Associated Press into the more sophisticated spam attacks which followed. This is a pretty good article, for a general-audience news outlet, I have to admit, because it covers a lot of bases. Here are a few excerpts, but the article itself is worth reading just to see how the mainstream media sometimes gets things right:
Minutes after any big celebrity dies, Internet swindlers get to work. They pump out specially created spam e-mails and throw up malicious websites to infect victims’ computers, hoping to capitalize on the sudden high demand for information.
Michael Jackson’s death was no different, and security experts say the fraud artists are just getting started.
The scams started cropping up almost instantaneously as Jackson’s death was still hitting the news. As days have gone by, they’ve gotten more sophisticated — and dangerous.
Jackson’s death “took a lot of people by surprise — the spammers, too,” said Dermot Harnett, principal analyst for anti-spam engineering at Symantec Corp., a security software maker. “It might take them some time to really pounce on this issue. They are catching up pretty quickly, though.”
. . .
The spam about Jackson’s death gets more convincing every day.
One message promises a YouTube video showing the exclusive “last work of Michael Jackson.” Instead, victims get a malicious program that steals their passwords. Another promises to show the “latest unpublished photos” of Jackson if you click on a link — one that also tries to install a password-stealing program on your machine.
Others purport to be from legitimate news outlets and may contain accurate enough information to convince viewers they’re real enough to click on. Others promise access to secret songs.
. . .
Celebrity deaths are a gold mine for criminals because lots of people go online looking for news. Google Inc. says the spike in searches for news stories about Jackson’s death was so sharp the company initially mistook it for an automated attack.
Many of the information-seekers can be tricked, via e-mail, into visiting malicious websites. That opens the door to all kinds of nastiness, like spying on what someone’s typing or using the hijacked machine to send spam.
There are also so many more websites about celebrities after their deaths that it’s hard to figure out which ones are legitimate fan sites, and which ones were created by criminals.
Registrations of domain names related to Jackson have spiked since the pop icon died Thursday afternoon. A leading registration company, GoDaddy.com, said it registered about 7,500 such names since then. Actress Farrah Fawcett, who died the same day, got about 100 domains in the same period. GoDaddy said, however, that it had yet to get any complaints that any of those addresses were used for scams.
Tags: Michael Jackson, spam
July 7th, 2009 at 4:04 am
[...] wrote about this last week, but wanted to provide an update, since I came across an article with a fair amount of detail (such [...]