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It seems to be a trend now, whenever someone famous dies some kind of malware or phishing scam will pop up playing on their death with the usual social engineering<\/a> aspect.<\/p>\n The most memorable one recently of course was the passing of The King of Pop – Michael Jackson<\/a><\/p>\n The latest one is Brittany Murphy who passed away last Sunday, search results lead users to fake anti-virus products labeled as ‘scareware’ tactics.<\/p>\n Actress Brittany Murphy’s sudden death, just like Michael Jackson’s untimely demise before her, has quickly been exploited by scareware scammers.<\/p>\n A spike in searches on Murphy’s death has been taken as a theme for Black Hat SEO attacks, designed to push sites that have been hacked to redirect surfers to scareware portals into prominence in search engine results.<\/p>\n Windows users who click on links to poisoned search results get exposed to a fake anti-virus scan, designed to frighten users into buying rogue security software of little or no utility.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n They have to act fast of course to get their results ranking at the top during the aftermath of a celebrity death.<\/p>\n For most tech-savvy users I don’t think it would be much of an issue, but for the average joe it seems they are fairly gullible when it comes to promises of anti-viral solutions.<\/p>\n Net security firm F-Secure, which has a full write-up of the attack here<\/a>, detects the strain of scareware involved in the attack as Fakevimes-T. More detail on how search results were poisoned can be found in a blog posting be WebSense here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Murphy, who starred in movies including 8 Mile, Sin City and Spun died on Sunday, 20 December after collapsing at her LA home<\/a>. She was only 32. The precise cause of death is yet to be determined but an autopsy is planned. \u00ae<\/p><\/blockquote>\n It’s a sad event nevertheless and I hope the news doesn’t come out that yet another celebrity died from a drug overdose.<\/p>\n It has been rumoured that Brittany Murphy used drugs due to intense Hollywood pressure to maintain her slim stature.<\/p>\n Oh well, Merry Christmas indeed!<\/p>\n <\/p>\n