Elizabeth Taylor's Death Exploited by Cyber Criminals

Scammers didn't miss the chance to exploit Elizabeth Taylor's death for their own financial gain, security vendors warn.

According to Kaspersky Lab Expert Dmitry Bestuzhev, spam messages reading "Download Movies Film legend Elizabeth Taylor dies at 79 (AP) [link]," have been spotted on Twitter.

spammers are using bit.ly links in the campaign, and statistics from the URL shortening service show that the same URL was recycled for several pay-per-click fraud schemes.

Pay-per-click or pay-per-action campaigns are usually executed through affiliate marketing programs, where the company organizing them is not necessarily aware their services are being abused.

Spammers trick people into visiting these websites and performing an action in order to earn commissions. This model is commonly used in spam attacks on social media websites.

According to statistics for this bit.ly URL, 55% of users who visited the spammed website were from US, 20% from Germany and 5% from France.

It's a well known fact that cyber criminals target any event that attracts public interest, be it a sporting competition, a natural disaster or a celebrity's death.

"Cyber criminals don’t care about morals and ethics. Money is money for them and topics like celebrity deaths, natural disasters and other critical situations have been used without any regret," notes Mr. Bestuzhev.

Two-time Academy Award-winner and one of the great actresses of the American film's golden age, Elizabeth Taylor passed away on March 23, 2011 at the age of 79 after suffering from congestive heart failure.

Other celebrity deaths targeted by spammers in the past two years include those of Brittany Murphy, Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson and Natasha Richardson.

Rumors about the death of other artists like Kanye West or Bill Cosby have also been leveraged to spread malware.