Scammers exploit bin Laden news in search, Facebook

Online scammers have been quick to capitalize on what will undoubtedly be one of the most significant news events this year: the death of Osama bin Laden.

Within hours of the news that the Al Qaeda leader had been killed by U.S. forces on Sunday, malware was found on sites optimized to show up on Web searches related to the event and in scams on Facebook.

Image searches and items labeled as video are proving particularly problematic as people are drawn to visual images of the terrorist leader. At least two domains were found to be serving up fake antivirus rogueware called "Best Antivirus 2011" on searches for "Osama bin Laden body" on a Google image search in Spanish, according to a blog post by Kaspersky Lab.

Another troublesome site involves a graphic doctored image of bin Laden. A Spanish language site was found to be displaying a photo that is supposed to be a shot of bin Laden after he was killed, accompanied by a news story about his death and what looks like a video. When the purported Flash Player window is clicked on, a message is shown prompting the visitor to update a VLC media player plug-in to view the video, Zscaler said in a blog post. Instead, an adware tool known as "hotbar" but labeled "XvidSetup.exe" is downloaded, the cloud security provider warned.

:story: Full story: c|net