Fake celebrity death reports are nothing new to the Internet—a quick search shows that in just the last few years, there have been rumors spread about the death of Britney Spears, Michael Jackson (uh, before he actually died), Justin Timberlake, Will Farrel, Sean Connery, and more. But with the proliferation of malware, celebrity death rumors can take on new life if spammers pick up on the trend. That's what happened overnight—a fake report about the death of Kanye West, originating as a prank, got co-opted by those looking to exploit your computer.

The original rumor is being widely attributed to the denizens of 4chan, which turned into one of those e-mail forwards that you have learned to automatically delete. The e-mail claims that West was involved in a car crash in Los Angeles—the details aren't all that interesting, but in case you're curious, there was allegedly a crash between a Porche and a Ferrari and three other people (who all lived) were involved. Needless to say, the crash did not happen and Kanye is still alive.

Some Internet users were savvy enough to try and search for information about Kanye's death before spreading the word, and that's when the search trend got picked up by malware makers. As noted by security research firm Sophos, "hackers" have exploited search engine optimization techniques to get their pages to the top of the search results when people look for the news. Clicking the links will take users to pages that push scareware and malware, which can then take over your machine and try to coerce you out of cash for a "fix."

Screenshot from Sophos

Celebrity-based exploits have become unfortunately commonplace. Over the last couple of years, there have been numerous reports of fake websites popping up to exploit celebrity searches. The most recent report on this came from McAfee in August, which warned that Seventh Heaven star Jessica Biel was the riskiest celebrity to search for, with users having a one-in-five chance of ending up at a site that hosts spyware, malware, viruses, adware, spam, or phishing scams.

The only thing different about the Kanye story, it seems, is that it originated as a nonmalicious hoax that quickly turned into a security risk. (We bet those at 4chan are silently chuckling to themselves over the unexpected success of that one.) The wise thing to do to protect yourself is, of course, to keep your machine up-to-date with antivirus software, and avoid clicking on unfamiliar websites to get your daily dose of celebrity gossip. Trust us: if Kanye dies, you'll hear about it on so many major news sites, you'll wish you had never searched for it in the first place.