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Posted on October 7th, 2011 in Spotlight, Trend Labs by TrendLabs | Be the first to comment |

After tricking users into viewing advertisements through a Facebook scam, cybercriminals are again capitalizing on the death of Steve Jobs through malicious spam.

We were able to find spam messages that contain the text “Steve Jobs Alive” or “Steve Jobs Not Dead”.

Another Steve Jobs-related spam we saw is in Portuguese, and includes a short text about his death:

The text in the message above roughly translates to the following:

Subject: Creator of Steve Jobs of Apple’s Mac, iPod and iPad dies
Steve Jobs, died of cancer aged 56
The death of Steve Jobs left an orphan of most of his creations, the Apple, a company shaped in accordance with their technological dreams and now faces the challenge of surviving in the absence of its visionary leader.
More news portal in direct U.S. in Portuguese
[LINK]

All messages come with a link, which when clicked currently redirects users to a blank site. We were unable to continue our analysis at this point. In cases like this, however, a blank page is rarely ever truly blank, and is often a sign that something else is happening in the background, away from the view of the user. For this particular attack, we found reports suggesting that the said site had previously contained a script that loads the BlackHole exploit kit.

We are currently monitoring all the sites for any further developments. Trend Micro users are already protected from this threat, as the spam messages and the URLs in them are already blocked through the Smart Protection Network.

Post from: TrendLabs | Malware Blog – by Trend Micro