Michael Jackson Memorial Service Pictures Disguise Malware

The unexpected demise of Michael Jackson, the world figure in pop music, not only led to an outburst of sentiments from his fans, friends and family, but also an outbreak of spam messages, which exploited this tragic event, as reported by Blog.trendmicro on July 19, 2009.

Security researchers at Trend Micro said that even as the memorial service of Michael Jackson (MJ) got over on July 7, 2009, spammers did not stop sending malicious e-mails linked to the star's death.

According to the researchers, they have recently found a spam message written in Portuguese language which tries to lure users by saying that they can find photographs of MJ's last rites in the e-mail.

As Jackson's admirers click on the photographs, they are led to an empty website that displays a dialog box, prompting them to download a given executable file called 'foto.exe'.

But Trend Micro detected this file as TROJ_DLOADER.ZRC, a malware which plants its own copies, establishes a new registry entry so that it may automatically run whenever the system starts up, and downloads a malevolent file that Trend Micro identified as TSPY_BANCOS.HZ.

Trend Micro has identified other malware spammers are currently using to infect people's computers after the death of MJ. This is one more data-stealing program detected as TROJ_ZBOT.AXY.

Moreover, spammers are regularly sending junk e-mails with offers of items for sale that they claim were possessed by Jackson, but in reality are fictitious.

Along with the security researchers from Trend Micro, Chia Wing Fei, Security Response Senior Manager at F-Secure also reports of spammers exploiting Jackson's death in their activities and decelerating the Internet.

Wing Fei further says that the number of website visitors curious to know about Jackson's death turned out so massive that the net tangibly slowed down resulting in problems on prominent Web services and sites. It is therefore hardly surprising that malware distributors and spammers too have started taking advantage of the enormous excitement the public displays for the 'King of Pop,' the expert observes, as reported by Expresscomputeronline on July 13, 2009.

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» SPAMfighter News - 8/8/2009