Fake news claims that Shakira died in a car accident

Sep 6, 2014 09:10 GMT  ·  By

Death hoaxes are generally run on social networks and direct to survey scams, but a recent one claiming that Shakira died is delivered via email and contains a malcrafted Word document to spread malware.

The campaign targets Spanish-speaking users, and messages as recent as September 5 have been recorded.

The fake news says that the singer and her manager were involved in a car accident in the Macarena neighborhood of Colombian capital, Bogota, resulting in Shakira’s death.

For more details about the accident and images, the unsuspecting user is directed towards an attached Microsoft Word document.

Trying to open the file results in an error stating in Spanish that the content cannot be displayed until macros are enabled in Word and offering instructions for disabling the security features in the Microsoft product.

Conrad Longmore of Dynamoo blog says that the detection rate for the virus on VirusTotal is very low, with only 2 of 54 engines marking the malicious file as a threat.

According to his analysis, once the infection completes, additional components are funneled in, from a dodgy Joomla-based website.

“In this case the originating IP was 207.150.195.247 (a SouthWeb Ventures IP allocated to a customer supposedly called ‘Microinformatica Gerencial, S.A. de C.V.’” he writes on the blog.