Cyber-Criminals Exploit Tragic Demise of Steve Jobs

According to researchers from M86 Security, when media declared Steve Jobs as dead, online-crooks instantly acted to exploit the sad newscast for churning fast bucks.

The company said that it had observed the thing in the case of all the famous personalities like 2Pac or Michael Jackson, and now it was happening with Steve Jobs whose name was being utilized as bait for conducting online-crime.

Many people got spam mails having headers -"Steve Jobs Not Dead!" "Steve Jobs Alive," "Is Steve Jobs Really Dead?" and "Steve Jobs" Not Dead Yet!" And inside the message bodies, there was one web-link, which was supposed to take them onto a breaking news-story.

The spam had cyber-criminals hijack CardioVascularLIVE a lawful Internet site into which they inserted malevolent diversion code.

As per M86, it's evident that following 2 diversions, victims land on a web-page that promises the Blackhole exploit toolkit. But, this toolkit attempts at abusing security flaws within the computer as well as ultimately taking down malevolent .exe files. Here M86 declares its uncertainty about the name of the eventual payload, since there wasn't any file taken down onto its trial PC.

Unluckily, plentiful Internet-users are likely to click through the spam mail considering that Steve Jobs had become an icon, the researchers bemoan.

Thus users are advised against following web-links within uninvited e-mails. In the current instance, it's only a click away to becoming hijacked.

Worryingly, it isn't only M86 Security for, Sophos another security company too reported about malicious e-mail campaigns emerging on Facebook, the social-networking site, soon after Steve Jobs' departure. Online-crooks crafted one Facebook web-page that carried one hostile URL as well as a message, which asserted that Apple was distributing fifty iPads for free as a mark for remembering Jobs. Nevertheless, if the URL was clicked, users rather than get iPads only became infected with malware.

Remarking about the above scams, Senior Technology Consultant Graham Cluley at Sophos stated that cyber-criminals/scammers had repeatedly proven themselves as devoid of any trepidation regarding abusing news-stories, irrespective of if those were about prominent historical happenings, natural calamities, or famous personalities' demises. Eweek.com published this, October 6, 2011.

Related article: Cyber Child abuser Sentenced To Imprisonment

» SPAMfighter News - 10/14/2011