Internet fraudsters claim celebrities have died in plane crash in latest trojan virus attack

Beyonce
Tom Cruise
Internet fraudsters are using hoax stories about the death of major celebrities to install viruses on thousands of people’s computers.
Scammers are sending emails containing links which claim that people like Beyonce, Tom Cruise or Tiger Woods have died in a plane or car crash.
One common email claims that the named celebrity has died along with 34 other people when their plane crashed into a mountainside while approaching the airport

Recipients are asked to open an attachment for further details.
But when the user clicks on the link a Trojan computer virus is installed on their computer which can then give the virus’ creator complete remote control of their machine.
According to internet security firm Symantec there has been a sharp rise in Trojan.Zbot infections since the beginning of August.
The firm is seeing around 80,000 – 100,000 infections each day using a variety of different scams.
The Zeus Trojan has been active for the past year and is used by fraudsters to steal information including logins and passwords which are stored on the user’s PC.
The fraudster can then use the PC owner’s logins and passwords to raid bank accounts or imply harvest the details and sell them onto other fraudsters via underground servers
Con Mallon, Norton Internet Security Expert, said: Ultimately your PC becomes a bot and therefore falls under the control of the ‘bot master’. This person or persons can then send instructions to your machine.
‘For example one thing we have noticed that it can do is to remove your ‘cookies’ meaning the next time you log into a web site you have to enter in the login and password and Zeus can monitor this and then send this information to a remote server.’
The Zeus trojan is even able to add extra fields to otherwise safe web pages.
This could be used to add a ‘false’ field that required you to type in your national security number when you are doing internet banking, for example.