You’ve heard about the tidal wave of spam e-mail and scammy Web links that followed the killing of Osama bin Laden by U.S. Special Forces on Sunday. But what about the latest round of e-mails offering death photos of the slain terrorist leader? Well, turns out they’re fake, also.
Security firm Websense warned on Wednesday about a new spam e-mail scam promising photos of bin Laden’s remains. The e-mails, most in Portuguese, contains a zipped attachment, Fotos.exe, which installs a banking trojan program, Websense reported on its blog.
The scam comes at a time of heightened discussion about photos of the slain bin Laden taken by U.S. Navy SEALS shortly after he was killed. Doctored photos claiming to show the face of the slain Al Qaeda leader were circulating online within hours of the news of bin Laden’s death becoming public. Many of those were linked to scam e-mails and social network campaigns.
Since then, the Obama administration said it will not release the photos, which are apparently quite graphic, despite pressure from the media and politicians to release the photo. In the meantime, some Capitol Hill lawmakers who claimed to have seen the death photos have had to backtrack – saying that the photos they were shown may have been fakes.
Websense notes that the “real photos” scam is just one of a wave of bin Laden related attacks that are circulating in e-mail, on the Web and on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.
