A fake photograph of a man's bloodied face allegedly belonging to Osama bin Laden has made the rounds online, tricking even major news outlets into falling for the bait, sources confirm.
The photo, which was reportedly aired first by a Pakistani TV network, went viral a few hours after US President Barack Obama's announcement of the death of the al-Qaeda leader, Reuters reports.
"The world needed a genuine photo to confirm that the elusive Islamic militant leader was dead," the news agency said. "But was it really Bin Laden?"
Reuters said there was "odd pixelation and blurring on his face, which was also darker in some areas," making the photo suspect.
The bottom part of the face also resembled a photo of bin Laden that Reuters took in 1998, it added.
"After overlaying the 1998 photo with the picture of the dead bin Laden we had a perfect match. The mouth, ear and beard were identical," it confirmed.
Falling prey
Other news agencies, however, weren't so discerning about the authenticity of the photo.
News websites such as The Daily Mail, The Sun, The Daily Mirror and The Daily Telegraph in the United Kingdom, and The New York Post in the United States all ran the photo, even without confirmation from US or Pakistani officials regarding its authenticity.
The photo has since been taken down from the newspapers' websites.
The Associated Press, meanwhile, retracted the photograph release it sent to subscribers worldwide, saying it cannot independently verify the veracity nor the source of the photo.
Spreading malware
Bin Laden's death has been such a hot topic online that, naturally, cybercriminals started to exploit its sudden surge of online activity, feeding into vulnerable users' curiosity.
Internet security firm Kaspersky Lab confirmed that cybercriminals have already spread rogueware via Blackhat SEO and Google Images, due to the increased seach activity on bin Laden's death.
A worm has likewise spread on Facebook, posting a video on users' walls titled "See picture of bin laden dead!" and described as "This will leave you speechless."
The security firm had also seen versions of the malware on Facebook's sidebar advertisements, enticing users to click on a link that leeds to free items "to celebrate Osama's death."
Mulling Release
The Obama administration, meanwhile, is still mulling the official release of photos of bin Laden's corpse to allay doubts that US forces had indeed killed him.
Officials described the photo as particularly "gruesome."
"What we don't want to do is to release anything that might be either misunderstood or that would cause other problems," said President Barack Obama's top counter-terrorism adviser, John Brennan, speaking on National Public Radio. —
TJD, GMA News
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