It's a virus.
The arrival of the royal baby on Monday – and the gluttonous news coverage and public interest that has surrounded it – was not lost on cyber criminals.
According to security firms Websense and Kaspersky Lab, online vandals wasted little time in capitalizing on the occasion by spreading malicious spam.
One such campaign involved at least 60,000 phishing messages that contained the enticing subject line, "The Royal Baby: Live Updates," and masqueraded as a ScribbleLive update from CNN. The email body contained a link that claimed to lead to a hospital cam, but actually directed users to the BlackHole exploit kit, a crimeware application that takes advantage of commonly unpatched vulnerabilities on victims' computers, distributed via drive-by download.
"The campaigns detected so far are utilizing email lures, which either redirect unsuspecting victims to BlackHole exploit kits URLs or, indeed, provide malicious attachments in the form of Windows SCR files in an attempt to dupe users," according to Websense. "These kinds of threats are often launched when topical or global news stories develop."
