Sadly, it has become a realization that whenever there is a huge incident that occurs in the world, people will try to exploit it for their benefit.  The Bhutto Assassination is no different.  This scam tries to convince unsuspecting users to download a fake codec, which in fact installs malicious software onto their systems.  This ‘codec’ is required to watch the Bhutto assassination… so if you get an email discussing this, just toss it in the trash.

Within hours of yesterday’s assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, malware makers exploited the breaking news to dupe users into downloading attack code, security researchers said Friday. Searches for news about Bhutto’s killing and the ensuing chaos in Pakistan listed sites pimping a bogus video coder/decoder (codec), said analysts at McAfee Inc., Symantec Corp. and WebSense Inc. For instance, WebSense found such a site simply by using “benazir” to search on Google. Meanwhile, McAfee quickly located 10 sites hosted on Blogger.com, Google Inc.’s blog service, that were spreading the fake codec.[more]

Tags: Hackers