Sea World killer whale attack video leads to malware

Dawn Brancheau, a trainer at Sea World in Orlando, was killed yesterday after being attacked by a killer whale.

News of the tragedy sped quickly around the world, and now sick cybercriminals are exploiting the story of 40-year-old Brancheau’s death for their own commerical gain.

Through SEO (search engine optimisation) techniques, hackers have created webpages stuffed with content which appears to be ghoulish video footage of the animal trainer’s death – but are really designed to infect visiting computers.

Searching for terms such as

killer whale video pictures

and

dawn brancheau video

can lead you to dangerous search results:

The heartless hackers are taking advantage of the hot news story by popping up fake anti-virus (also known as scareware or rogue anti-virus) alerts. The alerts are…

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.