It could not be any other way. The two most relevant events over the last few days are being used as bait to trick users and infect their PCs. These events are Osama Bin Laden’s death and the Royal Wedding.

The malicious file is the same in both cases, a banking Trojan seemingly originating from Brazil. In the case of Osama Bin Laden, the Trojan first tries to trick users by offering the White House’s best kept secret: the video of his death. Quite surprisingly, however, it also claims to have footage of Bin Laden alive and holding a newspaper dated after his “supposed” death. And, yes, it takes the opportunity to call Obama a liar, even in the file’s name.

And it is working. After analyzing the malicious URLs used to download malware over the last days, we’ve seen that, indeed, the links to Bin Laden’s videos appear in second and fourth place in the ranking (that is, people are massively clicking on them)

The malicious codes used are downloader Trojans belonging to the Banload family. They spread through email and social networks primarily and try to download two images from a webpage, which they later rename and run.

The second attack exploits the royal wedding between Prince William and Kate Middleton last Friday. In this case the bait is quite sensationalist: a ‘censored video of the Princess’ with an alleged ‘ex-boyfriend’ some weeks before the wedding. The malware used in this case is the same banking & downloader Trojan from Brazil.

We are glad to see that hackers stay up-to-date with the latest world news, but we are not so happy to learn that they keep exploiting them for their fraudulent activities. As always, we advise users to be very wary of this kind of content. If such videos really existed they would no doubt make the headlines on CNN or any other TV stations, they wouldn’t end up in your hands first.

In any event, if any of you have fallen victim to your own curiosity, we recommend that you scan your PC with a good free online antivirus (such as Panda ActiveScan) to make sure that this time at least, curiosity did not kill the cat”.