Michael Jackson’s anniversary has fuelled new inspiration for spammers, playing on devoted fan’s emotions as they mark a year since the singer’s death.
There are a series of spam emails circulating, advertising products related to the ‘King of Pop’, particularly commemorating his anniversary!
Symantec researcher Dermot Harnett said that the messages are titled “The Official Michael Jackson Commemorative Anniversary Coin in Loving Memory of Michael Jackson,” and advertise a collectable coin featuring Jackson’s image for a cost of $19.95.
An order form subsequently follows in order to purchase the coin requiring personal information including a home address, telephone number and credit card data. Basically all a spammer needs to steal your identity and/or your money.
Spam and malware campaigns centering on Jackson’s death are nothing new. When the singer died in June of last year, his name immediately became one of the most prevalent subject lines on all spam. On top of this Google failed to keep its news service up and running during the period preventing any warnings. This was caused by a run of web searches by users wanting to find out more on Jackson’s death. The rush of traffic and increasing volumes set off Google security controls and thus knocked the Google news service offline
However, this use of Jackson’s death and anniversary by spammers to target users is nothing new. High profile news events such as celebrity deaths have for several years been a major lure both for spam campaigns and for web-based malware attacks which fine-tune pages to appear high on search result rankings.
So… don’t be fooled into traps set by spammer’s particularly involving hot news topics! Always be aware when browsing and shopping online, or alternatively eliminate some of the worry by passing it on to us 
It’s as easy as ABC :)
