The one thing that has been proven to get someone’s attention is a catchy headline. Especially, if the headline is about a celebrity or some scandal that has happened to a politician. It is like driving past a car accident, you do not want to, but you cannot help but look at the accident scene. Everyone gets mad at the person ahead of them who does it, but by the time they get to the accident they are looking as well. Black hat hackers use this curiosity against you to get what they want. They use a sensational headline that is popular that day and make it so that you just have to click on it. Once you have click on the story, then you computer will pay the price.

A good example of this is what happened when Michael Jackson died. There was no bigger news story than Michael Jackson dying for the next couple of weeks. The stories were especially prevalent on the social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. Michael Jackson stories were everywhere and so were brand new ways to infect user’s computers. People were eating up the Michael Jackson news so black hat hackers took the opportunity and spread infections to a lot of unsuspecting people. So much so, that several popular web sites had to issue warnings telling people to watch out for this kind of attack. The safe thing to do was to only get sensationalist news such as this from web sites that you were familiar with. At the very least, get the news from web sites that were visited by people that you knew already. Randomly clicking on links in Twitter was bound to lead you to some bad places on the internet.

The Michael Jackson story was not the only time this has happened. There have been a few others stories over the past couple of months that this has happened to as well. Every time you hear about a big story breaking, you can be sure that there is a black hat hacker waiting to take advantage of the commotion. Lately they have even been making up stories so that people will click on the infected links. Even though the stories get debunked soon after it hits the internet, that still gives an attacker enough time to infect a lot of computers. A short burst like that can probably give them a better click ratio than they would get by using their normal tricks.

When you see news breaking or a story that seems unbelievable, always check a site that you know first before you go to any strange web sites. You have to remember that there are people that are trying to get into your computer. It is your job to head them off at the pass. You can do this by going to reliable web sites and not clicking on every link that seems interesting.

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