According to security experts, there have been reports of countless spam campaigns and malware attacks on the Web, being activated to take advantage of the news of the sudden death of pop music idol Michael Jackson on Thursday.

As the news of Michael Jackson's death spread in the conventional media, spam e-mails were launched by malware writers. Most such emails, launched within a day of the pop king's death, featured the words "Michael Jackson" in the subject lines, as a ploy to trick users to either purchase spurious products or click malicious files to trigger the distribution of fake antivirus software.

Experts at Symantec noted that there has already been a sudden increase of spam with Michael Jackson's name in subject lines to hook users to buy counterfeit products; and there would likely be a sharp spike in such spam campaigns over the next couple of days.

Elaborating on the spam campaigns, David Cowings - Senior Manager for Symantec Security Response - said that these begin due to automated spam tools that spammers use to hitch most recent headlines from news sources, so as to pull users and increase their bot networks.

Saying that the spam messages are at times distantly related the products being sold, Cowings said: "The biggest thing is getting someone to click into it a lot of times!"