14 DAY TRIAL // The man who secretly recorded ESPN reporter Erin Andrews changing in a hotel room and subsequently leaked the footage onto the Web, was sentenced to two and a half years in prison yesterday. The news has attracted the attention of spammers and scareware pushers, who are trying to profit from people searching for information related to the case.
Erin Andrews unwillingly captured media headlines last July, when a five-minute video depicting her unclothed surfaced online. The reporter's lawyers later confirmed that Andrews was surreptitiously videotaped without her consent, while alone in the privacy of her hotel room.
Michael David Barrett, 49, of Westmont, Illinois, was sentenced after admitting back in December to have stalked Andrews across three states and renting rooms in the same hotels as her. According to prosecutors, Barrett removed the peeping hole from a door and used his mobile phone to record the video.
The District Judge who delivered the prison sentence in Los Angeles, ordered the stalker to pay $7,366 in restitution to the victim, far from the $335,000 requested by her lawyers. At Monday's hearing, Andrews informed the court that she was suffering from anxiety because of the incident. "I’m being victimized every day... and I did nothing to deserve it," she said.
It is good to see that such a disturbing violation of privacy did not go unpunished. However, the sentencing has unfortunately peaked enough people's interest to draw the attention of spammers and other cyber-crooks looking to make a quick buck.
"As well as webpages, scores of uploads have been made to YouTube since yesterday's sentence claiming to contain footage from the controversial video. Typically, when played they will display a message saying that for copyright reasons they cannot show you the video - but instead urge you to click a link to a third party site. That link to a third party website may simply be designed to drive traffic to a spam page, or lead to a page which asks you to sign-up for a service, take a survey or carry malware," warns Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos.
Meanwhile, searching for keywords such as "Michael David Barrett sentence" has a great chance of leading to a website pushing scareware. The black hat search engine optimization (BHSEO) campaign has been so powerful that all but one of the results on the first page in Google are malicious.
