With the internet lighting up to express sadness at the death of Steve Jobs, security experts are warning of scammers attempting to take advantage.
According to Graham Cluley of Sophos, one Facebook scam has already emerged, purporting to offer users free iPads ‘in memory’ of Jobs.
“The cool-sounding link sucks you in, tricking you into believing that you may get a free iPad but then goes on to get you to complete online surveys to ‘qualify’,” he says.
“The link goes through the bit.ly short url service (we have asked our friends at bit.ly to shut the link down) and we can see that over 15,000 people have already clicked on the link, which was set up within hours of Steve Jobs’s death first being announced.”
In this case, he says, the aim is to clock up affiliate case by directing users to a competition web page, rather than to pages containing malicious code.
“Chances are that this won’t be the only scam we see regarding the untimely death of Steve Jobs,” says Cluley.
“It wouldn’t be a surprise, for instance, to see scams which might try to take advantage of those moved by the loss of Apple’s founder with lures like ‘Donate to Steve’s favourite charities as a tribute’.”
