Scareware Authors Exploiting Patrick Swayze’s Demise

As the users are curious to surf news over Internet about the demise of actor Patrick Swayze on September 14, 2009, various security researchers reported that cyber crooks are busy abusing the incident by distributing scareware. Swayze, 57, died of pancreatic cancer.

While giving further details about the current incident, security firm Sophos said that a technique, 'Search Engine Optimization (SEO) poisoning' is being exploited by the offenders to lure surfers to visit compromised websites.

Further explaining the techniques, the firm said that Black-hat search engine manipulation indicates that all those websites that notably appear in search engine results, like in Google, redirect users to websites slinging bogus anti-virus scanners. Users visiting such sites are warned of fake security problems in their computers by cybercriminals, in order to fool them into purchasing bogus software that is of either little or no utility to them.

The fake anti-virus program used to compromise users' computers has been detected as Troj/FakeAl-L by Sophos.

In the meantime, Graham Cluley, Senior Technology Consultant, Sophos, further added that sometimes scareware authors develop entirely new Web pages, i.e. new domains and then fill them with keywords, in an attempt to make them prominent on Google's search results, reported The Register on September 15, 2009.

Cluley, however, commented that this practice can work against the scareware authors, because of the fact that newly registered domains automatically appear suspicious as compared to the regular domain that have been prevalent for quite some time.

To be precise, an aware user can easily make out that domains providing news on search topics like 'Patrick Swayze's death' can be malicious, leading him to unknown malware-ridden domains and websites.

Cluley also figured out in his blog post that in this particular case, cyber crooks used similar tactics which they had earlier applied to abuse the actress Natasha Richardson's death as well as to exploit netizens' interest in 9/11 terror attack anniversary.

To conclude, Cluley stated that when it comes to grabbing the opportunity of a prevalent issue, cyber criminals don't waste a single minute, and become more professional in approach in relaying their anti-virus scams.

Related article: SecureWorks Identifies Bank and Information Stealing Trojan Coreflood

» SPAMfighter News - 10/5/2009