Mainz, Germany  - Spam distributors are working today's headlines into their pitches in an effort to grab attention, most recently utilizing swine flu as a way to grab eyeballs.

To do so, they use a crawler, which searches the internet for topics of general interest, reports Sophos, an internet security company based in Mainz, Germany. The headlines are then automatically turned into spam subject lines through which spammers hope to use to infiltrate people's computers.

In one case, spammers were using interest in the pandemic to try to draw people's interest to an online Canadian pharmacy. With that in mind, Sophos recommends internet users simply throw away e-mails referring to the global swine flu.

Spammers aren't just focusing on people's inboxes. They've used services like Twitter and other social networking sites to try to get close to internet surfers. (dpa)