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Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Account of the man who live tweeted Osama's death hacked

NEW DELHI: Security experts warning to Netizens that online scammers may seek to exploit the death of Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden to spread malware has come true.

According to security firm Websense, the website of Sohaib Athar (@ReallyVirtual), the man who unknowingly gave live ring-side view of the bin Laden's death on microblogging site Twitter, has been hacked.

Websense has discovered that the website belonging to Athar has been compromised by hackers and leads to the Blackhole exploit kit. This means Web surfers who visited Athar's blog, Reallyvirtual.com, early on Monday may have malware silently installed on their computers.

According Websense, "Anyone going to this page would also load content from the malicious URL ..., and the Blackhole Exploit Kit would then try to use several exploits to automatically install malware on the PC."

The malware that the drive-by-download attempts to install is a fake system tool named 'WindowsRecovery' that claims to have found problems on the victim's computer. To convince the user that something really is wrong with the system, the malware hides all files and folders in the hard drives and on the desktop says Websense in its blogpost.

And, not surprisingly, scammers offer the user a quick solution to this problems with a purchase of the premium version of 'WindowsRecovery', adds the blog post. 

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