Exploiting earthquakes
Within hours of the recent earthquake hitting Haiti, domains were being registered with earthquake-themed names. Not all of these domains will be used for malicious intent, but some certainly will be.
Ever since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, natural disasters have seen a surge in related fraud in the form of fake donation sites where people think they are donating to an official charity. There are also sites which masquerade as news channels about the disaster so that they can capture some of the search engine traffic and display a lot of pay-per-click banner adverts. One particularly nasty development is that some of these "news" sites offer live video reports for which the user needs to download the "latest video codec". Of course, this video software is actually a malicious concoction designed to hijack your machine and open the doors to the fraudsters.
If you wish to donate to the Haitian appeal, please use the Disaster Emergency Committee's official website to be certain you are donating to a genuine charity.
www.dec.org.uk
28th January 2010