McAfee - Spammers Capitalizing on New ‘Swine Flu’

In just a few days of news spreading about a swine influenza pandemic in Mexico, spammers are taking advantage of the situation to promote pharmaceuticals online. These miscreants are utilizing the opportunity of people's increasing interest in the swine flu outbreak to peddle bogus medications, warned security researchers at McAfee on April 28, 2009.

McAfee states that spam related to the swine influenza that started making way into users' inboxes during the 3rd weekend of April 2009 was responsible for 3-4% of the total spam on April 27, 2009.

Dave Marcus, Director of Security Research at McAfee, said on April 27, 2009 that there was a spike in the amount of spam mails showing captions like "Madonna caught swine flu!" and "First US swine flu victims!", as reported by ComputerWorld on April 27, 2009.

Furthermore, the e-mails contain links pointing to drug websites, which Marcus described as "bottom-of-the-barrel feeders" implying that they either distribute adulterated or counterfeit medications, or plainly aim to dig out credit card details from unsuspecting end-users.

Additionally, there are offers of video files but like always, these messages direct the user to download a certain codec online. This very common trick that usually necessitates the user to download an Adobe Flash Player update, rather than producing the codec, installs malicious program on the system, explains Marcus.

Marcus also says that the pattern of the spam campaign is the same as ones observed during 2008 or so. He notes domain name systems that consist of "swine" within their URLs are active, while search terms including keywords like 'flu' and 'swine' too produce high-ranking results.

Meanwhile, scammers are making the most from current events in order to distribute malware and spam and this practice is not new. The practice of spammers using favorite news headlines in their e-mails to entice users into opening malicious attachments or visiting similar websites has been prevalent for many years. It encourages end-users to downloaded malware.

Thus, McAfee recommends users that to remain safe from the attacks, they should not click on any suspicious link or open messages.

Related article: McAfee Alerts Windows about Accessibility Hole in Vista

» SPAMfighter News - 5/5/2009