Dead Celeb Searches Hijacked By Malware Authors
They are an annoying but often inevitable evil of the internet: cyber criminals, and this week they’ve been cashing in on the back of celebrity deaths.
Now people using the internet to search for information on celebrity deaths are being warned not to download anything that pops up once they’ve landed on a site.
Nasty cyber criminals have been infecting the search results for Michael Jackson’s newly released song, This Is It, with malware. Search results that are infected point to a video which, when clicked on, instructs the user to download and run “movie_hd_plugin_update.40014.exe”.
It goes without saying that you shouldn’t download anything of this sort unless you trust the source.
Searching for the latest bad news is leading thousands of users towards danger, and Jackson’s latest song is just one in a long line of bad-taste infection fodder favoured by recent scammers who have targeted searches for the deaths of Boyzone star Stephen Gately, actor Patrick Swayze, as well as the recent Pacific Ocean tsunami.
Do these people know no shame? Well no, of course not. If they’re looking to infect your computer, and possibly try to steal from you, an innocent stranger, then why would they care if the guise they conduct their behaviour under is in bad taste? They are just hijacking popular search terms, after all. You have been warned!
