Cybercriminals often take advantage of trending news or famous events to try to infect more users and increase their profit. This is the case of a criminal who profited from the death of basketball player Kobe Bryant.
The fact that cybercriminals modify their attacks based on current news, is not new, They do it because they know that being a trending topic, people will be interested in it and it will be easier to get potential victims.
Recently there was a case of a hacker who carried out a campaign phishing following the uproar over the Coronavirus. This campaign mainly affected the United States, and the computers were infected with the Emotet trojan.
Microsoft Security Intelligence revealed last week that an attacker had tried to use the news of Kobe's death to infect people. He did it by introducing a script to mine cryptocurrencies in a wallpaper of the player.
Este script It used the physical resources of the victims' computers to carry out cryptocurrency mining for the attacker's benefit.