Spam catches swine flu

Jake Widman
Thursday, 30 April 2009 02:43

Business IT - Technology

The publicity surrounding swine flu is starting to generate flu-related spam and domain name registrations, according to security researchers.

According to a post on the McAfee Avert Labs Blog, familiar pharmaceutical spam is starting to show up with flu-oriented subject lines.

The subjects reported by McAfee so far include "First US swine flu victims," "Swine flu in USA," and, for the celebrity-obsessed, "Salma Hayek caught swine flu!" and "Madonna caught swine flu!"

McAfee also reports that domain name registrations based on "swine" have increased thirtyfold.

That observation is confirmed by a report from security vendor F-Secure.

Just last weekend, F-Secure reports, new registrations included avoidswineflu.com, preventswineflu.com, swineflurecovery.org, and swineflu2010.us. (That's just four out of the 278 on F-Secure's list .)

According to F-Secure, none of the sites have yet been reported to contain malware.