F-Secure is reporting that hackers are continuing to exploit Patrick Swayze’s death with a trap claiming to be a video of the actor's funeral.
The lure — ‘BREAKING NEWS: Kanye West just interrupted Patrick Swayze funeral to let everyone know that Michael Jacksons funeral was better’ — listed in Google's search results, tricks people into clicking an image that appears to be a video stream of the funeral.
Clicking the image takes the user to another website promising another video, F-Secure says. Clicking the video results in the user unintentionally downloading a rogue antivirus (AV), which reports that the computer has been infected.
Screen shots of the phishing attack can be seen here.
The phishing attack follows another launched hours after Swayze’s death, also utilising Google.
When people search for news of the star's passing in Google, randomly checking the search results leads to a "news report", F-Secure says. Clicking on this story presents users with a rogue AV's 'invitation'. Any mouse action on the image ends with a download of the installer.
“One interesting detail is the rogue AV website includes a "geoip.php" that seems to be recording the city and country origin of each incoming connection,” F-Secure’s Chu Kian wrote in the company’s security blog.
“Could be for statistics tracking; it also seems to redirect anyone going back to the website for a second look, so you can't return to the exact same page.”