14 DAY TRIAL // Malware analysts from various security vendors warn that cyber crooks are capitalizing on the general public's interest into the deadly swine flu epidemic. Swine flu spam has started filling e-mail Inboxes aggressively at the beginning of this week, most of it pushing fake meds.
With the number of swine flu deaths exceeding 100 in Mexico and the first cases already confirmed in the U.S., Canada and different EU countries, it's understandable that people are scared for their wellbeing. It was also predictable that most of them would look for information on how to protect themselves from contracting this disease on the Internet and, sure enough, as Google Trends reveals, searches for the "swine flu" keywords seriously spiked in North America.
As past examples stand to show, cyber crooks are also watching these trends and adapting their campaigns in order to increase the pool of potential victims. The most common swine flu-related schemes so far have been centered around promoting and selling fake protection, under the form of meds or specialized documentation, but the researchers warn that this is only the beginning.
Sophos spam analysts have noticed a flood of spam pointing to infamous fake Canadian pharmacies. "Surprised? We shouldn’t be. Just another day in the office for spammers," Fraser Howard, the principal virus researcher at SophosLabs UK, notes. "Today’s news is tomorrow’s spam theme," he concludes.
A similar scheme has been detected by McAfee experts, who note that the spammers have combined it with a celebrity theme. "Salma Hayek caught swine flu!," "Swine flu in Hollywood!," "Madonna caught swine flu!," are just some of the titles used to entice users into opening the e-mails and clicking on the malicious links.
"Also, we’ve noticed domain name registrations mentioning the word swine are up by about 30 times and you can bet your daughters it’s not all going to be 'whitehat' SEO," Chris Barton, McAfee researcher, announces. F-Secure analysts have gone even further and have compiled a list of around 280 newly registered domain names that contain "swineflu" and that will most likely be used for future illicit operations.
One campaign that F-Secure has reported involves the selling of an alleged e-book in PDF format, called "Swine Flu Survival Guide," for $19.95. The company recommends keeping the money in your pockets and not spending it on useless electronic resources like this one.
Predictions are that, as the epidemic continues and the public will try to keep in touch with its latest developments, the cybercrooks will adopt other "lucrative" methods as well, such as pushing scareware. Blackhat search engine optimization techniques will most likely be used to make the new swine flu domains appear higher on search result pages.