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Royal Family engagement creates scareware opportunity

Wedding news searchers should stay away from portals of doom

The British Royal Family launched the biggest scareware marketing opportunity for months on Tuesday when Prince William announced plans to marry his long-term girlfriend Kate Middleton next year.

Cybercrooks commonly manipulate search results for newsworthy items to point surfers towards scareware portals that warn of non-existent threats on PCs in a bid to trick users into buying worthless technology. News that the second in line to the throne plans to get married next year is the arguably the biggest celebrity news since Michael Jackson died last year.

By coincidence the engagement was announced a day after the UK government launched the latest edition of its Get Safe online campaign with a warning over calls attempting to flog worthless scareware software.

The Queen may be on Facebook but she's perhaps not fully up to speed with government cybersecurity announcements, we suppose.

No scareware scams themed around the Royal engagement have appeared as yet and perhaps none will but it's better to be safe than sorry. We on the Reg's tin foil hat/internet meltdown desk like to get our warnings in early.

Surfers hoping to see pictures of the happy events would be well advised to restrict themselves to official news channels, such as this BBC report of the happy announcement here. ®

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