Malware attack targeting fans of Twilight series
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
As with many recent hot news trends, the upcoming release of the second movie based on Stephenie Meyer's Twilight books has attracted the attention not just of the vampire wannabes, but of actual cyber criminals as well.
The standard search engine manipulation techniques have been applied to sites laden with Twilight-specific keywords, including the name of the author. Yahoo Tech uses just such an example in describing one listing in the Google results for "Stephanie Meyer," which redirects unsuspecting Twilight fans to a site that displays a warning that their computer has been infected with malware.
Nothing of the kind has happened, of course, but the scareware presentation is frequently convincing enough for victims to provide money and personal information to bogus anti-virus programs in return for "protection." Ironically, allowing the scareware purveyors access to a PC can even result in the malware infection that they said they would cleanse.
Scareware scams are one of the fastest-growing sectors of online criminal activity, according to experts, with organized gangs working to bilk victims of untold sums every month.
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