May 2, 2011 13:00 GMT  ·  By

By now, news of Osama bin Laden's death have reached most people. Twitter and the web at large are aflutter with people sharing the story and providing their commentary and old media, TV, radio, newspapers and so on, is doing its best to keep up as well.

Naturally, search terms related to him and his death have surged and occupy the top spots in Google's Trends, in the US and the rest of the world, since everyone wants to find out more.

But, as is always the case with this type of events, the surge in searches is high time for those looking to make a profit to spring into action and there's evidence that they wasted little time.

Spam related to the death of Osama bin Laden is already hitting inboxes all over the world. Most people should know better than to follow links in emails coming from people they don't know, even if they seem legitimate and make it through the powerful spam filters most providers employ these days.

Inevitably though, some will be fooled, either because they're not really aware of the dangers or simply because they weren't paying too much attention.

"Watch out for the links you're likely to come across in email or on social networking sites offering you additional coverage of this newsworthy event," security company Sophos writes.

"Many of the links you see will be perfectly legitimate links. But at least some are almost certain to be dodgy links, deliberately distributed to trick you into hostile internet territory," it adds. "If in doubt, leave it out!"

So it's best to play it safe, if you do get an email that you should be receiving, just pass on it and don't click on the links, you'll find plenty of legitimate and useful info online.

Which leads to the second issue, black hat SEO - another big concern during big world events. Search engines have to move fast to index and rank content related to hot news events and this creates an opportunity for people up to no good to prop up their scam sites in the rankings for terms related to the event.

In this case, try to stick to the places you know and trust to get your info about Osama bin Laden. That is not to say that blogs or tweets couldn't be as useful or even more useful than the big news outlets, but you should be extra careful, especially now that the news is still fresh.