Patrick Swayze's death sparks spam campaign

The death of actor Patrick Swayze has kicked off a new round of spam runs, according to security experts.

Researchers at F-Secure reported spotting spam messages on the subject just hours after news of Swayze's death from pancreatic cancer first broke.

The attacks are said to use the tactic of search engine optimisation, loading web pages with references to the actor's name in the hope of obtaining a higher ranking in search engine results.

When someone runs a search on Swayze and ends up at the spam page, a pop-up informs the user of a malware 'infection' and then displays an image mimicking the Windows security screen.

Users who are duped by the false security alerts will then find their systems infected with a rogue anti-virus tool as well as a simple PHP script that logs the user's country and city location. Researchers believe that the information is being gathered for traffic analysis.

:story: Full story: V3.co.uk