Hackers Cash-In On Royal Wedding

The royal wedding ceremony of Prince Williams and Catherine Middleton was a globally watched event with people who were not invited or could not attend could see it live on the Royal Channel on YouTube. After the wedding, Internet users were seen scrambling for wedding related photos, videos etc. Hackers seem to have taken advantage of this and routed them onto malicious sites since they tend to exploit popularly used search terms.  Googling “royal wedding coverage” on Google Images – which the company said was the number one search term in the US - led users to a bogus computer infection warning. This particular malware has surpassed all efforts to kill it. While its main aim is to steal credit card numbers for scammers based in Eastern Europe, it also installs various password-stealing applications by exploiting the security holes in the user's computer. Meantime, Google has responded to the malware attack piggy-backed on the royal wedding, “Google can respond quickly to new threats like these because utilizing popular search terms and events to lure users into visiting malicious web pages is not new. We've looked at these issues closely and work hard to protect our users from malware. We actively work to detect and flag sites that serve malware, keeping on top of the latest trends and watching for popular search terms. To do this, we have manual and automated processes in place to enforce our policies. We're always exploring new ways to identify and eliminate malicious sites from our index.”