Malaysia Airlines air disaster–another event bringing out the online scams

Article

Fake Malaysia Airlines links spread malware | CNET News

My Comments

Every time there is a major event that affects many people or brings out mass intrigue, a computer-security situation climbs on to that event’s tail.

What happens is that Websites with a questionable motive pop up like nobody’s business and links to these sites appear in spam emails or on the Social Web. The “link-bait” text draws people to these sites are laden with malware or set up to harvest Web-surfers’ personal or financial information for questionable purposes. The Malaysian Airlines air disaster drew out its own link-bait in the form of fake news links that purport to lead to video footage of the plane being discovered or survivors being found.

A proper practice is to keep the software on personal and other computer equipment “lock-step” with the latest software updates and patches and simply to “think before you click”. This is more so with anything that appears “too good to be true” or “out of the norm” for that situation.

Facebook users also have to be careful about the “fake events” which are being used as a spam-distribution vector. Here, as I previously covered, this causes notifications to appear in the user’s Facebook Notification list with your computer or mobile device popping up messages and sounding an audible alert to these notifications if a Facebook client is running. As well, if a user accepts these events, information appears on their Timeline about that event.

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