This strange and wonderful weekend has been one of the most historic this side of the century, and we turn to the internet as a real pulse of the world. The streaming of the royal wedding merely prepped the world wide web for the news of Osama bin Laden’s death, which shook Twitter as the digital telegram network delivered to billions. It’s the power and reach of that network that entices the underbelly of the internet, too. Within minutes of bin Laden’s death being confirmed, cyber criminals began working the search system. When the news about President Obama confirming the death of the Al Qaeda leader broke out, malware started showing up on search engines, claiming to optimize the results about the event. Even Facebook wasn’t spared as a medium for these malicious attacks.
According to Kaspersky Lab, since people are most drawn into the images of Bin Laden’s dead body, two domains took the liberty to serve a fake anti-virus by the keyword “Osama Bin Laden body” on Google Image Spanish search. Another Spanish-language site photoshopped bin Laden’s dead body after he was shot, added by a seemingly legitimate news story and a video. When you click on the video to play, it prompts the viewer to update a VLC media player plug-in, which is actually an adware tool called “hotbar” but is disguised as “XvidSetup.exe, warns Zscaler in a blogpost.
Another spam activity sets on Facebook, where a spam message cloaked as “Sweet! FREE Subway To Celebrate Osamas Death – 56 Left HURRY!” or “2 Southwest Plane Tickets for Free – 56 Left Hurry” was being circulated. It has a link inviting users to post the information to their wall in order to keep the scam strewn.
“The scheme of this scam is to keep redirecting you to pages where you have to enter information such as email, and eventually get money for all new users or clicks,” Kaspersky said. Another security provider, Imperva, found instructions how to launch a viral scam on Facebook at a forum for black hat search engine optimization saying “Monetize This NOW! Just a tip to the newbies starting out” and “You’ll probably get 90 % USA FB users.”
“5/1/2011 – This is one of those rare opportunities that can build you a great list and a a couple of zeros in your profit. Use it while the news of Bin Laden killed by US forces is hot,” the post says. “I just started one and it had 600 likes in 2 minutes.”
There’s no doubt that search engine optimization is something web publishers strive for. It’s become a basic form of economic exchange on the web. Below is an infographic showing the history of search and SEO, spanning the major engines and their many industry milestones.
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[...] devices and they leverage celebrity deaths and fear of death to do it. In the past we’ve seen the death of bin Ladin, Amy Winehouse, and others leveraged to these ends. We’ve even witnessed scammers use Steve [...]
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