An unfortunate side effect of any news-worthy disasters of the modern day is that a wave of malware will often follow in the virtual world after the initial event in the physical world. The large earthquake (8.3 on the Richter scale) last night recorded off the coast of Western Samoa and the subsequent tsunami that followed caused much destruction and loss of life to the islands near the epicentre of the quake. As with any large scale disasters that quickly become major news events, people want to know what happened and to know that loved ones are safe. The Web, being a major source of information to many people around the world, is one of the first places to see such information-seeking activity. For many people, search engines are the gateway to the masses of information available and because of this, it is also one of the first places to be targeted by malware creators. They waste no time in getting their malicious software and web sites set up and poisoning the Web...
Tennis is a huge sport worldwide and yesterday was the women's semi final of the US Open in which Serena Williams lost out to her rival due to a foot fault. To cut to the chase, Ms Williams went on to deliver a verbal volley against the line judge, something about shoving tennis balls … somewhere. The exchange was caught on live video footage and many copies are currently doing the rounds on the Internet. The interest that this incident has stirred, provided the spark needed to ignite yet another SEO campaign to spread malware. In the case of this incident, the malware is encountered when you search for terms such as "Serena Williams Outburst".
One of the sites returned from the search goes to a domain named pixnat.com. This looks like another case of hacked web site used to host fake AV scanners...
