Miley Cyrus Celebrity Death Hoax Meets Malware Scam

Celebrity hoaxes can lead to more dangerous scams, as a recent example involving Miley Cyrus highlights.

Celebrity death hoaxes are an established and entirely pointless type of hoax that regularly circulates the Internet, targeting various celebs such as Jackie Chan and Morgan Freeman.

Whilst many of these hoaxes are nothing more than exercises in time wasting, scammers can easily combine them with malicious scams to add a nasty sting to their tail.

For example pop star Miley Cyrus (who has hit the headlines more than once over the last few months) has had her very own celebrity death hoax circulate social media asserting the singer killed herself.

However this message didn’t merely link to a harmless fake news report as many of these types of hoaxes do. In this case this was a malware scam that linked to an external website promising to offer a video of Cyrus’s apparent suicide note/video.

After visiting the site, victims are asked to install video plugins to watch the video, but after installing the plugin the victim them realises that they’ve installed malware, and there is no video featuring Miley Cyrus.

Luring victims with video plugins/codecs/updates in order to watch a video is a popular way of tricking victims into installing malware onto their computers and we discuss it here.

So, remember…

1. Don’t get your news from social media. Go to reputable media sites to confirm/debunk stories you here.
2. Don’t click on suspicious links on social media.
3. Don’t install video updates from untrusted websites.