Scammers, Spammers Embrace Swine Flu News

There's something vaguely diabolical about a form of unwanted communication named after a brand of canned, chopped pork that piggybacks on a public health scare involving a flu strain derived from swine. Yes, you guessed it: Spammers have seized upon public awareness around the Swine Flu epidemic to hawk knockoff prescription drugs.

And we're not talking about flu vaccines, either. According to McAfee Avert Labs, over the weekend spammers began pumping out junk e-mail with various Swine Flu subject lines to trick people into opening the missives.

McAfee says the first of those spam campaigns amounted to about 2 percent of global spam volume. Meanwhile, it appears that dozens of new Web site names with the term "swineflu" included in them were registered during the last few days.