Malicious Spam Depicts Demise of Venezuela President

According to security experts at Sophos, with the intention of victimizing netizens from Latin America, the fake death news of the Venezuelan President, Hugo Chavez was taking rounds in the air.

The e-mail starts with the revelation of death news of the 57-year-old Chavez, fighting with cancer.

The fake death news of the president further reveals of the state of affairs in political world, as leaders have expressed their shock and condolences at the sudden dismal of the leader through the media.

However, in reality, Chavez is under chemotherapy treatment for cancer, and is presently doing quite well and can be conceived to be fit for fighting the next election.

This fake e-mail with the announcement of sudden death of the President appears to come from a newspaper website. It also contains a link to a video showing the dead President.

The message informs and approves the recipient of the death of President Chavez due to cancer, as taken from a fake article published on a fraud website.

Graham Cluley, Senior Technology Consultant at Sophos denotes that the alleged video actually seems to be a malware, W32/Dorkbot-AM recognized by Sophos. To add the flavor of authenticity to the attempt, the website also exhibited a message claiming the multimedia file to have compressed into a Winrar archive to facilitate people with a slow connection, as published by softpedia on December 13, 2011.

It is quite obvious that crooks will be relying upon fake news and remains dependant upon the familiarity of the well-accepted sites for launching their fake schemes. Thus, it is advisable for internauts to double cross the sources of a story and ensure the correctness of the URL. This is so because of recent, the numbers of cyber crimes have increased extensively in the past.

However, Chavez is definitely not the first political figure to be hit by such malicious campaign. Early in August 2011, rumors of Cuban President, Fidel Castro's death also took rounds in the net, following the depiction of the Cuban leader lying in a coffin through a spam e-mail. This e-mail malware was unmasked as fraudulent breaking news by Sophos.

Related article: Malicious Scripts with Zero-byte Padding can Pass Undetected

» SPAMfighter News - 12/22/2011