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This week we’re going to take a look at how spammers and scammers use news headlines to do their dirty work.  It’s an old and well worn technique, presumably because of its effectiveness.  Scammers and spammers love to send emails and links claiming to have exclusive info about a hot news story.  So far this year we’ve seen spam with subjects such as President Obama’s inauguration, the Swine Flu outbreak, the Air France tragedy, and now the spam making the rounds claims to have exclusive footage of Michael Jackson’s last moments alive.  They do this because they know people are likely to be looking for information on such hot topics and as a result may be more likely to click on titillating links about then.

Yes, the music icon’s shocking and sudden death is the newest thing to be exploited by spammers and scammers alike.  The messages range from simple text based spam asking the recipient to reply to receive some exclusive info about Jackson’s death (meant to harvest their email address for a future attack, since the reply tells them the address is both active and receptive to spam!) to malicious messages with links to fake news videos that quietly infest the viewers computer with malware.

The most popular malware at the moment is ZBot, a Trojan that steals personal information from the victim’s computer and monitors a list of major sites that includes Amazon, Paypal, Ebay, and most major U.S. Banks.  When it detects a site on the list has been loaded, a keylogger is activated and records the victims log on credentials.  ZBot has also been discovered harvesting FTP log on credentials for over 68,000 major websites including Bank of America. It’s a very nasty piece of malware that looks to be targeting both businesses and end users.

Other Jackson themed spam has been showing up on blog comments and social networking sites, again claiming to have pics or videos of Jackson’s last moments or autopsy.  The links usually lead to malicious sites that harvest personal info.

The latest wave of Jackson themed spam is being sent with the subject line “Remembering Michael Jackson” and claims to be from michaeljackson.com.  The link in the message claims to lead to an unreleased song or video of the pop legend’s.  Instead it leads to the Ackantta-F worm, which emails itself to everyone on the infected machine’s contact list, and is network aware which means it can spread to other machines networked to the infected one as well as to any memory cards or USB sticks connected to it.

To protect yourself get your Michael Jackson news from reputable news sources only.  Don’t ever click on links in emails or posts claiming to offer secret or exclusive songs, videos, pictures or any other kind of information, especially if the email or message was unsolicited and/or from someone you don’t know.

Web traffic rose to a historic high when the news of Jackson’s death broke.  In fact the traffic was so high several major sites (Including Google, Twitter and AIM) crashed under its weight. Spammers and scammers are doing everything they can to take advantage of that huge audience so beware and stay safe!