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ghouls
This page considers online exploitation of the dead.
It covers -
introduction
Boundaries between the living and the dead in all societies
are often more permeable than commonly imagined and there
are always organisations or individuals ready to exploit
the grief, guilt or curiosity of survivors.
Celebrities, for example, are often figuratively disinterred
and dissected before the grass has grown over the plot.
Some consumers are avid for what has been characterised
as murderabilia -
souvenirs, macabre or otherwise, from crime scenes or
criminals. Others are exploited, often quite comfortably,
because they -
- go
in search of memorials to a loved one or deceased associate
- visit
what might prove to be the blog or personal site of
a deceased person, but alas is not
- engage
in gawking, serendipitously
or deliberately encountering pages, posts and links
that are ostensibly dedicated to accident victims or
disasters.
Aspects
of such exploitation by online ghouls are discussed in
the following paragraphs.
infections
Filtering by ISPs and wariness on the part of some email
recipients regarding attachment-borne viruses and poisoned
links in messages has led some hackers to covertly encourage
web users to download malware through mistakenly clicking
on links in what purport to be obituaries, online memorials
or news items.
The extent of that exploitation is unclear, with increasing
incidence reflecting media coverage of its effectiveness.
Some malware downloaded through such links appears to
be a virus of a purely destructive nature. It has been
claimed, however, that some malware used by ghouls aims
to provide the offender with access to the victim's password/s
and credit card/account details.
In 2007 for example there were US reports that criminals
had created fake memorial sites that supposedly featured
video of the deceased person. Naive users responded to
indicators advising visitors to those sites that they
should update their software or download new software
in order to view the video. Clicking on the link for that
'update'/'installation' instead infected the visitors
machine with something nasty.
There
have been suggestions that hacking rings are systematically
creating fake memorial sites, drawing on online news services
and even obituary notices. Those suggestions are problematical:
there are no authoritative statistics.
advertisements
Other deaths are exploited by people who set up misleading
link pages on a sponsored basis.
The New York Times for example noted in 2007
that search engines featured links to what purported to
be video, still images or text regarding the death of
celebrities or local personalities, typically through
accidents or murders. Those links however pointed the
unwary consumer to pages that featured pay-per-click advertisements
but no original content. The pages appeared on sites that
allow 'authors' to share revenue with the site operator,
that revenue coming from contextual advertisements.
Xomba ("show & tell has never been so rewarding")
for example encourages people to create pages with the
statement "This author is making money and so can
you!".
One site operator approached by the Times indicated
that the user who created a particular page had violated
its rules, piously commenting "They should know that
you can't sensationalize a post and basically lie about
it".
domain names
Opportunistic domain registration of the names of dead
people or of disasters, whether for transfer at a profit
to grieving families or to attract web traffic, is discussed
elsewhere on this site.
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