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Castro’s Expiry Possibly Hoax E-mail to Spread Malware

PC-hackers, in their attempts to search new victims each day across the Web as also former Cuban president Fidel Castro in extremely fragile health, are working to infect users' systems with a malicious worm, published Prominent on January 2, 2012.

The worm reportedly, is spreading through reverberated messages on Twitter.com that Castro is no more. According to security experts, although Castro, at 86, has been severely unwell, still no associated quarters as such have confirmed the news.

In the meantime, the so-called news is believed to be a fake for disseminating a worm through e-mail.

The electronic mail arrives with an artificially created photograph that shows Castro inside a coffin. Countries within Latin America even find the e-mail containing the logos of Univision or other TV networks so victims can be potentially misguided. There's another fraud in the e-mail, a promise for one movie file depicting Hugo Chavez sitting close to the coffin, in tears.

This way of spreading the worm is called phishing wherein bulk e-mails are randomly dispatched to innumerable ids in anticipation that at least a few recipients will view them and follow the embedded web-link that'll eventually load the malware.

Understandably, Twitter subsequently assisted in disseminating the misinformation via letting a hash tag, given the name "fiedelcastro," to act like hot news. The tag for a while became very popular, on No.4 globally, since it caught the attention of an even larger audience.

Hence, experts are recommending Internet-users that any e-mail coming into their mailbox that talks of Castro's death, while asks to visit a web-link alternatively, even worse, view a particular attachment, should be instantly discarded.

Meanwhile, news of Fidel Castro's apparent death manipulated to spread a PC-virus isn't unknown. Such a hoax campaign was circulated to target several people's inboxes back in January 2011 as well.

Thus security specialists state that people require waiting as well as watching whether Castro is truly dead alternatively whether, as also it is suspected, the tweet is yet one more scam. For the time being, however, it'll perhaps be an intelligent idea for being more cautious with one's electronic mails.

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» SPAMfighter News - 1/10/2012

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