Mumbai: As the operation carried out by the US special forces in Abbottabad, Pakistan, to terminate Osama Bin Laden came to light on Monday morning, cyber criminals immediately got on the job and tried to make the best of it.
Kaspersky Lab expert, David Jacoby, in his report, said, "The news about the death of Osama Bin Laden is starting to reach everyone around the world. We have noticed that every time something big like this happens, people get curious and start searching on the internet." During his research, he found that cyber criminals are spreading rogueware via Blackhat SEO and Google images.
Further, a search carried out on popular social networking site Facebook led to several tiny urls carrying details about Laden's death, videos, images and news reports. The urls asked the user to click and led to some other webpage carrying messages such as "Sweet! FREE Subway To Celebrate Osama's Death - 56 Left HURRY!" or "2 Southwest Plane Tickets for Free - 56 Left Hurry".
The user is then asked to post a message if he or she wants to win the air tickets and further instructions are given. If the user writes the message, it will post a new message on the user's wall to spread it further, and then redirect to another page offering more gifts and items to be won. The scheme of this scam is to keep redirecting the user to pages where information, such as email, needs to be entered, and eventually get money for all new users or clicks.
Another trojan that has infected cyber space using Bin Laden's name, in search engines like Google images, has been making rounds. It has been detected as Trojan.Win32.FakeAV.cvoo.
Detected by the Kapsersky Lab, it is spreading through searches launched on the search engine which has been poisoned by cyber criminals. The search directs users to malicious web pages and further links to domains such as antivirus.cz.cc/fast-scan and pe-antivirus.cz.cc/fast-scan/. Both domains offer a copy of the rogueware known as 'Best Antivirus 2011'.
"These poisoned searches on popular search engines and social networking sites are re-launched only to get confidential details of people. In most cases, there is a huge possibility that the user's computer will fall prey to the rogueware turning it into a zombie computer, which, without the user's knowledge, will then be controlled by the cyber criminals," said an e-security expert.
0 comments:
Post a Comment