Scammers have already begun to exploit the recent death of 32-year-old actress Brittany Murphy.

"A spike in searches on Murphy's death has been taken as a theme for Black Hat SEO attacks, designed to push sites that have been hacked to redirect surfers to scareware portals into prominence in search engine results," writes The Register's John Leyden. "Windows users who click on links to poisoned search results get exposed to a fake anti-virus scan, designed to frighten users into buying rogue security software of little or no utility."

"Net security firm F-Secure, which has a full write-up of the attack here, detects the strain of scareware involved in the attack as Fakevimes-T," Leyden writes.

Click here to read the story at The Register.