One of the most common ways to propagate malware through social engineering is to piggyback it on some attention-catching news event. This can be carried out using a variety of techniques and is certainly nothing new. One infamous example from 2007 was Win32/Nuwar (a/k/a the Storm Worm), which distributed through spam emails with current and/or sensational subjects. As part of an evolution seen in malware, the trends have moved towards spamming popular social networks such as Facebook or Twitter and black hat search engine optimization (BHSEO).
A recent example of the latter was abusing the recent tragedy in Japan, as David Harley commented on here.
Another one which is current these days is the upcoming British royal wedding. When searching keywords relating to this event (e.g., "middleton wedding dress idea") in your search engine, malicious links are among the top results. And the category of malware which sits behind them hardly comes as a surprise - rogue anti-virus apps.
This particular variant is detected by ESET as Win32/Adware.XPAntiSpyware.AB.
Robert Lipovsky
Malware Researcher
