Follow on Google News News By Tag Industry News News By Place Country(s) Industry News
Follow on Google News | Facebook Scammers Exploit Steve Jobs’ Death, According to PandaLabs- The malicious website is very similar to ones used by other scams involving the release of the iPhone5 and the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks
By: Neil Martin - The scam claimed that an unnamed company is giving away free iPads ‘in memory of Steve Jobs’ Bracknell, October 7th, 2011: PandaLabs, the antimalware laboratory of Panda Security, has detected a malicious link on Facebook that exploits news of the death of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs as bait. Just a few hours after Steve Jobs’ death, scammers had created a Facebook page called R.I.P Steve Jobs which contained a malicious URL and a text claiming that 50 free iPads were given away ‘in memory of Steve Jobs’. The page gained five new fans every second and had more than 90,000 fans. Image available at http://prensa.pandasecurity.com/ These frauds work by tricking users into visiting websites where they are told they have won some hot gadget: an iPad, an iPhone, a TV set, etc. In this case, users are induced to sign up for a premium-rate text messaging service with charges of 1.42 euros per message. Obviously, the unsuspecting victim will never get the prize, but rather a series of costly spam SMS messages. In addition, the malicious website uses geolocation to display messages in different languages depending on the user’s location. English - http://press.pandasecurity.com/ French - http://press.pandasecurity.com/ German - http://press.pandasecurity.com/ Over 21,000 users have clicked the link in less than eight hours - http://press.pandasecurity.com/ http://press.pandasecurity.com/ “Unfortunately, as soon as we learned of Steve Jobs’ death, we knew scammers would start to figure out how to exploit it”, said Luis Corrons, technical director of PandaLabs. “It is not unusual for cyber-crooks and fraudsters to take advantage of headline-grabbing events to spread their creations and affect the maximum number of victims possible”. The URL shortening service used in the scam seems to indicate this is the same malicious webpage used in similar attacks involving the launch of the iPhone5 or the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Learn more at: www.pandalabs.com. About Pandalabs Since 1990, PandaLabs, Panda Security’s malware research laboratory, has been working to detect and classify malware in order to protect consumers and companies against new Internet threats. To do so, PandaLabs uses Collective Intelligence, a cloud-based proprietary system that leverages the knowledge gathered from Panda’s user community to automatically detect, analyze and classify the more than 73,000 new malware strains that appear every day. This automated malware classification is complemented through the work of an international team with researchers specialized each in a specific type of malware (viruses, worms, Trojans, spyware and other attacks) to provide global coverage. Get more information about PandaLabs and subscribe to its blog news feed at http://pandalabs.pandasecurity.com/ PR Contact: Neil Martin neil.martin@ Tel. 0844 335 3791 Follow us on: Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/ Twitter - http://twitter.com/ End
|
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Account Phone Number