The Tiger Wood car accident - which has caused a media speculation frenzy over the weekend as to the reason why Tiger Woods had crashed his car in a fire hydrant near to his home - was picked up by TV stations from Friday evening onwards.
The incident was also used by hackers as early as Saturday morning as a subject line for a high definition video download. Hackers have also seeded the internet search engines with details of the so-called Tiger Woods car accident download.
As with previous `interesting' videos, the hackers exploiting the Tiger Woods car accident allow users to download the video once the user has downloaded a video codec for the file. The `HD codec' download, however, is merely a front for the Proxy-JN trojan.
According to Sophos' senior technology consultant, Graham Cluley, it is clear that hackers have chosen to jump on the coattails of the currently hot story of Tiger Woods' car accident simply because so many people are searching the internet for news about it right now.
"By using search engine optimisation techniques to push their poisoned webpages higher up in search results, the bad guys are hoping that they will increase the number of people who click on their links, and thus infect as many computers as possible", he said in a blog posting about the trojan infection.
"Of course, this isn't the first time that a world famous sports celebrity has been the subject of a malware campaign like this. For instance, in September hackers attacked users who were hunting for video footage of tennis ace Serena Williams losing her cool on the tennis court", he added.
Early reports on the Proxy-JN trojan suggest it is relatively innocuous, although one report notes that it opens random ports in an attempt to download further malware onto the users' PC.