PandaLabs reports they have detected a malicious link spreading across Facebook which is being used to take advantage of the news yesterday concerning Steve Jobs death.
They are apparently using a Facebook page which contains a URL along with a description that states iPads were being given away in memory of Steve Jobs. According to PandaLabs the page was seeing five new fans every second and as of yesterday had more than 90,000 fans.
The page is now disabled however, it is unclear how many people may have become infected by the scam since there were over 21,000 clicks on the link in less than 8 hours.
"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 in a short period of time."
These scams work by tricking users into visiting websites where they are told they have won a valuable prize, such as an iPad, an iPhone or TV set. Obviously, the unsuspecting victim will never get the prize, but rather a series of costly spam SMS messages. In addition, malicious websites like these leverage geo-location data to display messages in different languages depending on the user’s location.
As always you should be extremely cautious around these types of scams. They take advantage of recent news and events in order to gain your trust and then get you to click or follow their link. That link could either be meant to deliver a payload onto your computer (such as a virus, malware, worm) or to get you to provide personal information that can be exploited.
If you suspect you may be infected by this event or any other make sure you get good anti-virus on your system to clean things up and then always run an up to date and current anti-virus/anti-malware on your system at all times.
Stay safe and cautious out there and expect there to more attempts like this in the coming days using similar ploys.
