Within hours of the catastrophe, scammers had started flooding e-mail inboxes with messages asking recipients to donate money to relief efforts

More than 6,000 km away, Jisbin Matthew had no idea that Japan's date with nature's fury would kindle his own personal tragedy. Matthew was looking for unseen videos of the earthquake and tsunami when he fell prey to cyber criminals. atthew, who works for an international bank, was shocked to notice that after clicking on a certain video link his system crashed and he could not access his e-mails.

"After coming to know about the tragedy, I started looking for more content online. I viewed many videos of the disaster, but there was a link that said 'amateur never seen video' and when I clicked on it, my computer shut down. I took it to a friend who works in the technical support department of an MNC and he told me that I had become a victim of a cyber attack," explained Matthew.

Malware attack!
Even cyber crime experts have confirmed that within hours of the tragedy, malware writers had started creating scripts and infected links related to earthquake and Tsunami in Japan.u00a0 Cyber criminals pick up news very quickly and in the case of Japan it took them hardly a few hours. We knew that they would try to cash in on this tragedy, but these links started appearing in a record-breaking time ufffd less than three hours after the earthquake," said Vivek Vohra, a Delhi-based ethical hacker.

Even social networking websites, which helped in passing on updated information during the calamity, have become a new arena to spread malware.

The motives of these cyber crooks are not only related to monetary gains but are also about creating panic.
"Scammers are also flooding e-mail inboxes with messages asking recipients to donate money to relief efforts.
This is very typical, especially with disasters, because they can ask for donations or pose as a legitimate charitable organisation," said Jagannath Patnaik, director, channel sales (South Asia), Kaspersky Lab.

Trend Micro reported on a phishing site that had 'Japan' in its URL, saying that the site was harvesting e-mail addresses and other personal information from unsuspecting users. "We have already seen fake donation sites, spam," said Amit Nath, country manager (India) and SAARC, Trend Micro.

He added, "Users who really want to make a donation should ensure that they do so only on trusted sites. They manually double-check the URLs they are connecting to. Do not trust email messages offering 'one-click-donation' or similar services."