Malware writers, always eager to take advantage of breaking news to get victims to click on bad links and download Trojans, have already jumped on the largest recent Internet message stream -- the flood of grief and commentary surrounding the death of singer Michael Jackson.

The volume of Web traffic surrounding Jackson's death became so huge that there was a tangible Web slowdown, with problems affecting major Web sites and services. Google, for instance, admitted on its official blog that its Google News site initially took the spike in searches as an automated attack...