Spammers are trying to flog dodgy pharmaceuticals on the back of the swine flu epidemic.

Security firm McAfee reports that the junk mail campaign accounts for one in 50 spam emails currently doing the rounds globally. The spam message deluge, sent through compromised machines, features junk mail messages containing links to online pharmacies.

The junk mail messages come with a variety of subject lines, such as "First US swine flu victims!" and "Madonna caught swine flu!", as explained in a blog posting by McAfee here. Web users are advised to ignore all such messages and get their information from recognised news outlets.

In a related development, F-secure adds that domain names associated with swine flu have been registered, many of which point to dodgy sites. One is selling a swine flu survival guide for $19.95, for example.

(The Register)