Patrick Swayze’s death exploited by scareware hackers

Patrick Swayze, the star of movies such as “Dirty Dancing” and “Ghost”, has died after fighting cancer of the pancreas for two years.

Although the entertainment world mourns his loss, heartless hackers are taking advantage of the hot news story by creating malicious webpages that lead to fake anti-virus (also known as scareware or rogue anti-virus) alerts.

Watch the following YouTube video to see how easy it is to be hit by an attack like this.

Sophos has added detection for the fake anti-virus program,…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

Graham Cluley is a veteran of the anti-virus industry having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent security analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of computer security, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter at @gcluley, on Mastodon at @[email protected], or drop him an email.