According to Sophos, the latest trend in email scams is to send messages claiming to point to music videos of various stars. Needless to say, all that the user get in return is a Trojan horse installed on his machine. Once infected, the computer may be used by hackers to steal personal information, spam out malware and junk email, or launch distributed denial of service attacks.

"Earlier this week hackers were pretending that their emails pointed to a YouTube video, before that they posed as ecards or breaking news stories. What’s clear is that they will keep on adopting new disguises to try and infect the Windows computers of innocent internet surfers. Some may find the prospect of viewing the next Beyonce video irresistible. This is less of a technological problem, and more of a human problem. […] people need to stop clicking on links in unsolicited emails or risk a computer virus infection." (Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos)

Sophos warns users to be careful with emails that feature one of the following lines as subject: "awesome new video", “Cool Video is out", "dude, check out this video, is not out yet", "dude this is not even on MTV yet", "OMG, check out the new video", "this video rocks".

Beyonce, Kelly Clarkson, Rihanna, The Eagles, Foo Fighters, R. Kelly, and Velvet Revolver are the main names used in the recent spam campaign.