Hackers capitalise on Swayze’s death

SYDNEY - Hackers are using Patrick Swayze’s death to push off spurious anti-virus software to Internet users and infect their computers with viruses.

The 57-year-old Swayze died of pancreatic cancer on Monday.

Many bogus websites claiming to provide information on the death of the Dirty Dancing star have mushroomed up.

Computer security company Sophos recently showed in a recent video that hackers list these sites on the first page of search engines like Google.

Visitors to these sites are asked for an anti-virus scan and the result shows that the user’s computer is infected by Trojans, which are actually not present. The sites then try to sell fake anti-virus software to the users to clean up their systems.

Many sites also infect the users’ computer with viruses that can crack passwords and credit card numbers and send them to the hackers.

Hackers have also used the deaths of Michael Jackson and Natasha Richardson to lead users to virus infected sites.

The Sydney Morning Herald quoted Sophos senior technology consultant Graham Cluley as saying: “Clearly the cybercriminals are no slackers when it comes to jumping on a trending internet topic, and are more professional than ever before in spreading their fake anti-virus scams.” (ANI)