Security Response

Strange stories of celebrities' deaths resulting from plane crashes or car accidents have suddenly erupted in the spam ring. The intention of distributing such false news is to spread viruses using HTML or zipped attachments. This is one more in a series of recent virus attacks seen in the last few weeks. We had written about one of the attacks in a recent Security Response Blog post. This is an old trick of using celebrity names to lure recipients into opening malicious URLs or attachments.

In one of the campaigns seen, spammers are using subject lines showing that a celebrity has died. Examples include:

• Beyonce Knowles died
• Bon Jovi died
• Brad Pitt died
• Cameron Diaz died
• David Beckham died
• Gwen Stefani died
• Jay-Z died
• Jennifer Aniston died
• Jennifer Lopez died
• Johnny Depp died...