Tsunami Spawns New Wave Of Web Attacks

With every world event, online criminals will find a way to exploit it to line their own pockets.

We saw attacks rise with Michael Jackson’s death and more recently when actor Patrick Swayze died.  Now, following the Tsumani in Samoa, web attacks are again on the rise according to web security firm F-Secure.

Cyber criminals are trying to exploit the public interest in the Samoa earthquake and tsunami, with Google searches for news about the disaster leading to rogue anti-virus software.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) poisoning is the current “trend” for directing users to rogue antivirus software. These SEO poisoning attacks usually exploit major news topics, such as the Tuesday’s earthquake and Patrick Swayze’s death.

In addition, tweets are also apparently being used to direct people looking for tsunami news to rogue AV.

Screenshots of the malicious Google results and the rouge AV tweet can be found on F-Secure’s weblog: http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/