"The [search engine poisoning] is fully automated," Hypponen said, referring to the tactic where hackers and other cyber criminals pollute search engine results with pages containing links to malicious sites.

"They automatically generate pages with worthless content, or sometimes with no content at all," said Hypponen. "This works especially well when the news hasn't yet been covered by a normal site. It's possible for anybody to get their page within the top 10 [results] by being fast enough."

Hypponen expected that cyber criminals will continue to exploit Bin Laden's death for some time to come. "They usually keep trying longer than it actually works," he said. "Most people won't be falling for [such scams] for very long, but the video might work for a while, because I wouldn't expect the U.S. to release a real video."

Also part of the Bin Laden campaigns, experts said yesterday, was the first attempt by online crooks to push to Apple's customers.

Gregg Keizer covers Microsoft, security issues, Apple, Web browsers and general technology breaking news for Computerworld. Follow Gregg on Twitter at or subscribe to . His e-mail address is .