Michael Jackson's Death was Thriller come to life : Evil spirit also coming out of dark corners of the internet to trap the Michael Jackson's Beloved fans.In Under eight hours spammers and cyber criminals to launch spam attacks that exploited interest in the pop idol’s untimely death. Security firm Sophos spotted the first spam messages, which claimed to have vital information about Mr. Jackson and asking for a reply. The firm speculated the goal was to verify live e-mail addresses for future spam blasts or to gain the confidence of people who responded for some other scam.
“The fact is that cybercriminals have no respect for taste and decency. The only thing they are interested in is making some money for themselves, and turning other computer users’ lives into a misery,” wrote senior technology consultant Graham Cluley.
Soon after, researchers at Websense isolated a spam e-mail mimicking a news report about Mr. Jackson’s death and displaying what appeared to be a link to YouTube that actually sent visitors to a compromised Web site. There, Windows PCs would be infected with a Trojan Horse designed to steal information. SANS, an organization for security pros, said the attack appeared to have been launched from somewhere in Spain.
Unfortunately, attacks like these have followed many celebrity deaths – even the death of Pope John Paul II – as well as natural disasters and other tragedies. The reason is simple; scammers are trying to capitalize on intense interest in a topic to lure visitors to their malicious Web sites. Sadly, attacks using Mr. Jackson’s name are bound to grow; his death has sparked so much public interest that Google described search traffic about him as “volcanic.” It was heavy enough that Google’s automated systems thought for a time that Google was under attack.
Also yesterday, scammers were using Farrah Fawcett’s death from cancer to reel in victims. Sophos discovered a Web-based attack by running a simple Google search about the star. On the first page of results was a link to a site claiming to have news, pictures and videos, but a click on the link redirected visitors to a page attempting to scam people with fake antivirus software, known by security experts as scareware.

Source : iblog-entertainment.blogspot.com