By Madhuri Dey
Dec. 22, (THAINDIAN NEWS) The death of a celebrity means a lot of searches regarding her, something that has been utilized by criminals who spread rogue anti virus campaigns. Since the premature demise of the 32 year old actress has triggered a lot of interest in the matter, it has become one of the top searched topics ever since the news of the death had become known. The phenomenon has been taken advantage of by the cyber criminals.

Brittany Murphy passed away of a sudden cardiac attack on the morning of Sunday, Dec. 20. Since then, Google has reported that a lot of the search terms related to the actress and her death had been spiked. In fact, the top ten searches in the list had been spiked, so that, by clicking on them, the user inadvertently exposed the computer to malware. After he clicks on one such link, a window opens that shows the regular warning that is displayed every time the computer is at the risk of being harmed by malware. Then, the process of installation of the anti-virus software begins.

At this stage, the user is advised to stop the installation, because these are actually malware in the innocuous guise of anti-virus software. That is, by installing the software, the user would be downloading the virus in his computer. It has been reported that these files are commonly named install.exe, so that it becomes difficult to distinguish them from the normal variants of real anti-virus software available, and also prevents them from drawing too much attention. The only way to avoid this problem is to avail only of the well known news links.