Scammers Inundate Internet with ‘Swine Flu’ Spam

According to Trend Micro, the Japanese Internet security company, cyber criminals are making the most from people's fears about the 'swine influenza' by sending e-mails that pledge to provide news about the 'flu,' but end up delivering malware or false medication for penis enlargement and potency drugs.

Security researchers said that the swine virus had turned into a PC virus (that exploited people's interest, fear and confusion about the epidemic as they surfed on the Web for information) to distribute junk e-mails, disseminate malicious codes and infect systems.

Jamz Yaneza, Threats Research Manager at Trend Micro, says that the whole thing is made worse with the circulation of wrong information about the swine influenza, as reported by AFP on May 1, 2009.

Yaneza adds the bad guys are taking advantage of people's fear, and due to all the nervousness from the disease, users are tempted to open the malicious e-mails.

Moreover, subject spaces in the spam mails display captions like "Madonna Catches Swine Flu!" and "Swine Flu Outbreak!" to draw people's attention through social engineering.

Additionally, security researchers state that spam messages, with the phrase "swine flu" as the keyword, have inundated the Net as con artists pursue to take advantage of worries about the attacks from the virus.

Agreeably, Yaneza said that opportunistic spammers and scammers were actively exploiting the buzz about swine influenza by spamvertizing links that led to fake 'Swine Flu Survival Guides.' The links, Yaneza explained, were being spamvertized with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of domains that pertained to the attack.

In the meantime, the National Institute of Infectious Diseases (Japan) also issued an alert about a suspicious e-mail written in Japanese-language and was carrying an attachment titled "information on swine flu".

Furthermore, it is understood that Conficker-infected zombie PCs that hugely increased during 2009 are among systems pushing swine flu spam.

Meanwhile, cyber criminals' use of viral outbreaks to make their spam campaigns appear trustworthy is not new. In 2003, a similar spam scam occurred during the SARS pandemic when the Coronex virus spread bulk e-mails related to the disease.

Related article: Scammers Exploit Tax System Resulting in ID Theft

» SPAMfighter News - 5/8/2009