Websense ThreatSeeker® Network has been tracking an ongoing spam campaign relating to reports of Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi's death.  We have been monitoring related spam campaigns about Gaddafi for a while now, and the recent rumours of his death as stated here on Reuters seem to have raised the bar a little with an influx of such spam.

The scams, like many others similar to this, bear the usual traits with a request for the victim to help the assailant, and then further going through the motions of trying to make the message convincing by legitimising the content with a news article. 

Below we have a number of examples of the messages we have seen through our feeds.

From the above messages, we can ascertain that a lot of work was put into the detail to lure the unsuspecting victim into believing this.  This also reinforces a point made in the past about the real nature of current spammers, as all forms of current news just become another means of propagating spam.

At the time of writing this blog, the keyword 'Gaddafi' seems to be the highest-ranking trend on Twitter.

Websense Email Security and Websense Web Security protect against this kind of blended threat with ACE, our Advanced Classification Engine.