The tragic news of Brittany Murphy’s unexpected passing affected many. However, there are some to whom this news affected in a different way – they saw a way to make a buck.
Personally, I think it’s rather sick, but there are some individuals who have taken this opportunity to take a hot news item and push spam and malware. Quick dirty black-hat SEO methods can often get high results quickly, but then are found by Google and taken offline. The issue is that even the short amount of time listings like these stay online can be enough to infect several machines.
Newer black-hat SEO attacks use news events to get attention to sites that pose as news sites, but act only to infect machines with malware schemes. Be cautious when visiting unknown news sites that are “reporting” on hot news items.
The Tech Herald has more information on this particular attack, and F-Secure has more information on the specific malware details.