Spammers Could Take Advantage of O.J. Simpson Prosecution

According to a warning released by security company MX Logic, users should watch out for spams talking about the guilty verdict of O.J. Simpson, an ex-professional and famous football player.

According to the reports, a Las Vegas jury found Simpson guilty on October 3, 2008 of a number of charges stemming from the robbery of a pair of sports memorabilia merchants in 2007. The judgment came after thirteen years when Simpson's was pardoned of the assassinations of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson along with her friend Ronald Goldman. The company's security experts state that spammers could exploit this news episode to serve their malicious purposes.

According to Sam Masiello, Vice President of Information Security at MX Logic, every time a sensational news story arises, spammers use it as bait to trick people into clicking a link in to download their malicious programs, as reported by Computerworld on October 6, 2008.

Meanwhile, although MX Logic has not spotted any spam relating to Simpson, Masiello said that the company's researchers have found clues of an imminent campaign. According to Masiello, MX Logic has found corrupt search hits on Microsoft's Live Search that point to some Live Spaces entertaining bogus video codecs. The tactic, called "search engine poisoning" is often used together with malware spam.

Furthermore, the researchers at MX Logic said that online criminals attempt to fool search engines, and get them to rank malevolent sites high on the list of results by flooding message boards and blogs with fake entries that automated bots add. Masiello commented that the criminals would use anything to push up their chosen results on search engines.

Moreover, the security researchers say that the most probable Simpson spam strategy would be similar to the massive August 2008 spam campaigns that enticed the users into visiting malware-laden Websites by promising to show video films from the MSNBC and CNN news channels. Through those spams, cyber miscreants tricked users into downloading a malicious exploit code by lying them that it was a necessary codec to run the video.

Related article: Spammers Continue their Campaigns Successfully

» SPAMfighter News - 10/14/2008