Kanye West death prank used to sling scareware Rumours of the death of rapper Kanye West in a car crash became fodder for fake anti-malware scams on Tuesday. Users searching for more info on the fictitious fatality are liable to get redirected to sites distributing scareware, security researchers warn. The rumour itself reportedly originated on notorious image board 4chan …
Does this not happen every day on that Internet, that an alarmist story is used to distribute malware - trojans, keyloggers? Wait, you said scareware. Why is it scareware this time? Scared that Kanye West is dead? And I suppose the other slightly-not-every-day element in the story is that a significant number of people apparently took it seriously enough to make it noteable. Still, this is the internet. It all goes away when you switch off your PC, and quite a lot of it isn't there the next day.
Scareware is actually stuff that scares the user into splashing money actually..
like fake anti virus telling you that you have 489 infections and you need to buy there program,
why read el reg is you cant even understand some simple shit like what scareware is, thats the scary part!
Hopefully when we all switch out boxes on tommoro, you mr Robert Carnegie wont be here.
@Robert Carnegie
Yes, everyday there are new attacks on the Internet. Everyday, thousands of bits of malware are generated, some released into the wild, others held back for another time. However, it IS worth reporting on SEO poisoning and these celebrity death hoaxes to warn the general public to make these attacks less successful, and to show them that you always have to be vigilant.
We do the same thing here at Sophos. We try to talk about relevant security threats and educate users to the tricks that malware authors use. In fact, we too posted about this today:
http://www.sophos.com/blogs/gc/g/2009/10/21/kanye-west-died-car-crash-hackers-exploit-rumour/
Beth Jones, SophosLabs
The Register 
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