Osama bin Laden’s death is widely used today by hackers to lure unwitting people into installing malware. The tricks work because people want to see the photos of a dead Al Qaeda leader, but the alleged pictures of bin Laden’s corps are in fact malicious, warned the FBI.

"It's not really surprising," said Mikko Hypponen, the chief research officer of Helsinki-based F-Secure. "We were expecting to see related malware."

Earlier today, F-Secure warned users to steer clear of spam that included the "Fotos_Osama_Bin_Laden.zip" archive attachment. The messages claim the file contains photos of Bin Laden after he was shot and killed by U.S. special forces during a 40-minute firefight in his compound in the northern Pakistani city of Abbottabad.

But when a user runs the resulting Windows executable file it launches a new banking Trojan horse belonging to the three-year-old "Banload" line, said Hypponen. The malware sniffs out online banking sessions and then tries to redirect payments to other accounts.

Bin Laden spam with malware was also tracked by other security firms.