Malicious News Websites Reporting on the Death of Robin Williams
Our favorite and beloved comedian and actor, Robin Williams has died and cyber-criminals have already started taking advantage of his death.in less than 12 hours after news broke that Robin Williams committed suicide, cyber-criminal have already started creating fake and malicious websites, which they are attempting to lure their potential victims to.
They do this in order to trick their victims into stealing their online social networking account user names and passwords, and sharing malicious websites, by promising to show them a video of the crime scene or a video of Robin Williams ending his life.
Robin Williams
Robin Williams dies at age 63
July 21, 1951 to August 11, 2014
How the Scam Works
What these heartless cyber-criminals have done is to create posts on social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter with links to their malicious websites. Once social networking users see the post, they will attempt to view it, thinking it is legitimate.
Once the social networking users are taken to the malicious websites, they will be asked to share or “like” the website in order to view the video or article of Robin Williams. There is no video and sharing or “liking” anything on the malicious website will only help spread this scam to the victims’ Facebook or other social networking friends.
The victims may be taken to a malicious and fake Facebook websites and ask to sign into their accounts. Once they have entered their user names and passwords on the malicious websites, this information will be sent to the scammers behind the scam, who will use to hijack the victims' accounts.
The hijacked accounts will be used by the scammers or cyber-criminals to send spam and other malicious posts to the victims’ social networking friends. These hijacked accounts may get banned because of the threat they pose to other users.
Some of these websites may have viruses, malware and other threats, which the cyber-criminals will attempt to trick their potential victims into downloading and installing. Once installed, the virus or malware will infect the victims’ computers, and the cybercriminals behind the scam will be able to access and take control of their computers, remotely from anywhere around the world. They may spy on them, use their computers to commit cybercrimes, or steal their personal and financial information.
The victims may also be asked to complete surveys, which the cyber-criminals will get paid for. They also get paid for the advertisements that are displayed on the websites.
If you see news reports posted on any social networking websites, please check with a popular and reputable news website before “liking”, commenting on, or sharing it. If you are not able to verify the authenticity of the news article or locate it on any reputable news websites, delete it.
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Note: Some of the information in samples on this website may have been impersonated or spoofed.