There have been some weird email messages going around about stories of celebrity deaths. These messages are being sent by a spam ring with the intent to distribute viruses using HTML or zipped attachments. This tactic could be very affective as people just love gossip and this type of gossip is on the extreme side. The first report of such attacks was originally reported by Symantec’s Security Response Blog.
Here are some of the celebrities’ names found in the dead pool, so to speak.
- Beyonce Knowles died
- Bon Jovi died
- Brad Pitt died
- Cameron Diaz died
- David Beckham died
- Gwen Stefani died
- Jay-Z died
- Jennifer Aniston died
- Jennifer Lopez died
- Johnny Depp died
- Justin Timberlake died
- Kanye West died
- Miley Cyrus died
- Nicole Kidman died
- Ronaldinho died
- Tiger Woods died
- Tom Cruise died
Some of these messages look real and are crafted with messages like;
The celebrity has died along with 34 other people when their plane carrying the group on a trip crashed into a mountainside while approaching the airport. For further details, recipients are asked to open the malicious attachment. In another example, we observed that the subject lines were changed to show that the celebrities had a fatal car crash and they were killed in that accident.
Sample image of the message:
Do not open any emails or attachments with a celebrities name in the subject line. The zipped attachment named “[REMOVED]Hot News.zip,” was detected as Trojan.Zbot.
WTF! The Miley Cyrus part is kinda lame. Thanks for the tip tho!
This style is something new for me and it is a very interesting and juicy bait. Scammers are really creative, so we must work doubly hard to uncover their spammy ways.
Andrew,
You are right this is a juicy bait and one that people will feed on.
It is really sad that spammers get peoples attention by these kind of emails. Who in the world with a little bit of common sense would believe that so many celebrities from movie and music business are together on one plane for a group vacation .. come on
Thanks for info.
My rule would be not to follow or open anything in my e-mail that resembles spam. It’s really not safe to open an e-mail from someone you don’t know and that mail has attachments, or the sender is asking you to visit sites. New stories but just old ways of fooling gullible people.