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spam, phishing and swine flu

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Nitpicker1
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« on: April 29, 2009, 08:00:43 am »

From Times Online
April 28, 2009

Cybercriminals exploit swine flu fears with spam emails
Bogus online pharmacies are trying to harvest credit card details by offering 'anti-flu' drugs, security companies warn


Mike Harvey, Technology Correspondent
Spammers and cybercriminals are looking to exploit fears over swine flu to peddle counterfeit drugs and steal credit card details, internet security firms have warned.

Millions of spam emails are flooding the internet, sending recipients to fake online pharmacies or enticing users to click on links leading to malicious software.

McAfee, one of the leading security software makers, said that its laboratories had detected a spike in swine-flu spam only a couple of days after the news of the spread of the disease broke.

Spammers who remotely control millions of infected machines are using them to send out emails with subject lines aimed at enticing users to click through. These have included: "First US swine flu victims!", "Salma Hayek caught swine flu!", "Swine flu in Hollywood!" and "Madonna caught swine flu!".

McAfee estimated that swine-flu spam on Monday already accounted for 2 per cent of the global total.

Greg Day, its principal security analyst, said that spammers were looking to exploit people's fears about access to drugs to treat swine flu and their campagns were becoming more responsive and sophisticated.

Buyers who used online pharmacies advertised in the messages had no guarantees that the drugs were genuine and often anyone sending money received nothing. Other sites simply acted as a way of harvesting credit card details, he said.

He said that he expected spam filters installed on many computers would catch some of the emails but cybercriminals would engineer new variants. "There will be more varying titles. This is going to be a topical message for some weeks," he said.

Chris Barton, a McAfee researcher, said in a blog posting that he expected the pharmaceutical sites would soon start touting oseltamivir - the prescription antiviral drug marketed as Tamiflu.

Security researchers also found that domain registrations of websites that included "swine" in their names were up thirtyfold. These sites could be aimed at people searching for news about swine flu. Those landing on the sites and clicking on stories within them might be loading viruses on their computers, researchers warned.

Sophos, another internet security company, also issued an alert over the spam blitz. Fraser Howard, a researcher, noted: "Surprised? We shouldn't be. Just another day in the office for spammers. Crawling news sites for suitable stories to use in campaigns is commonplace and very easy to automate."

Researchers at the security software maker F-Secure warned that one site, noswineflu.com, tries to con readers into buying a PDF called "Swine Flu Survival Guide" for $19.95.

All internet security firms recommend that users should never click on links inside emails from unknown sources and spam messages should always be deleted without opening.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/health/article6187942.ece

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