Spammers exploit Michael Jackson death

Peter Dinham
Monday, 13 July 2009 16:27

Business IT - Security

Spammers and malicious code authors have created and launched several new spam and malware campaigns using the death of Michael Jackson as a cover for their infected emails.

Since the pop star’s death on 25 June a number of spam and malware campaigns have taken shape using his image in the email or with references in the subject line like Who killed Michael Jackson? , All M. Jackson's faces, Jackson is still alive: proof, Remembering Michael Jackson, Tonight: Celine Dion Reflects on Michael Jackson!, Remembering Michael Jackson, and so on......
 
The latest spam report from Symantec shows that, generally, spam volumes in June continued to fluctuate but averaged approximately 90 percent of all email messages.
 
Symantec reports that the recent death of Michael Jackson, and the subsequent public interest combined with the Fourth of July holiday (in the US) showed that spammers were willing to use any notable event as a cover to distribute their messages.
 
“Various image spam obfuscation techniques that have recently been observed demonstrated that spammers continue to invest in this particular spam threat,” reports Symantec.

According to Symantec, another trend observed in June was that of a mass-mailing worm in fake Twitter account invites.

Symantec says that Twitter was used as bait to lure innocent victims into a phishing trap.

CONTINUED page 2