Selma Hayek and Swines?

Fraudtsers wait for this.

Like ambulance chasers, fraudsters aiming to profit from charitable donations or from pushing viruses onto other computers wait for epidemics like the recent swine flu outbreak.

How do they do it?

Aside from feeding off of the panic that these situations bring about, cyberopportunists react ahead of the curve to the change in people's web surfing habits. Fraudsters include catchy phrases in their virus-laden e-mails associating the epidemic with someone or something people are familiar with (false subject headlines such as "Selma Hayek has the swine flu!") and improve their own websites using SEO (search engine optimization) techniques to draw people searching for info on the epidemic to their malicious webpages.

In much the same way that fraudsters jump quickly to profit from this usually short-lived panic, internet security companies are quick on their trail, taking websites offline and creating updates for anti-virus software.

Swine flu cases cause outbreak of fraud on internet
SCMagazineUS.com - Monday, April 27, 2009

Cyberopportunists are trying to cash in on the swine flu outbreak by launching spam attacks and registering URLs that reference the hot news story.

Security firm McAfee said Monday that about two percent of all spam now contains the words "swine" and "flu," while competitor F-Secure reported that at least 146 domains containing references to the outbreak were registered over the weekend.

"We absolutely saw this one coming," Dave Marcus, director of security research and communications at McAfee Avert Labs, told SCMagazineUS.com on Monday.

Neither the emails nor the websites appear to be foisting malware, but a majority are linking to pharmaceutical websites, Marcus said. Some of the messages are arriving with subject headings such as "Salama Hayek caught swine flu!" to entice users to read them.
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Continue to the rest of the SC Magazine article.

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