News about royal engagement leads to malware

Taking advantage of the long awaited news of the engagement of Prince William of England to his long-time girlfriend Kate Middleton, malware pushers have hopped immediately on the wagon and initiated their search poisoning campaigns.

Sunbelt reports that searching for photos of the future royal bride results in some images that redirect the (Firefox) users to a website where they are urged to download a Trojan masquerading as a Firefox update:

But, that’s no the only instance of search poisoning regarding this announcement. According to The Tech Herald, terms related to “prince william engagement”, “kate middleton prince william”, “royal wedding prince william” and their various variants all show signs of search poisoning – no wonder, since all those search terms are currently detected as trending by Google.

The destination pages are usually legitimate ones, but are rarely ones dedicated to bringing news to readers. Depending on which browser the users are using, they will be redirected either to a YouTube-like page offering a video codec or to a page sporting and infection warning and offering a fake AV for download (IE users), or to the aforementioned fake “Firefox update” page (Firefox users).

If you really must know all the details about this particular engagement, we suggest you look for them on reputable news sites.