The Storm worm's authors have temporarily abandoned their tactic of using recent news headlines and are instead using fabricated events.

Researchers have reported a new round of spam tied to the Storm network which alludes to fake news stories.

The emails contain such headlines as 'Eiffel Tower damaged by massive earthquake' and 'Donald Trump missing, feared kidnapped.'

The bodies of the emails contain links which claim to provide further information on the story.

However, the links direct to a page designed to resemble adult video site Porntube. When users click on one of the supposed video links on the page, an executable is launched which installs the Storm malware.

"This clever social engineering technique plays on people's inquisitiveness about news of natural disasters and celebrities," said McAfee researcher Kevin McGhee.

"The emails also follow the simple format of some text and a link that looks fairly harmless to the uneducated user."

The emails mark a deviation for Storm from its usual tactic of spamming articles and videos of current events and holidays.

They also build on a recently discovered attack in which a worm was spread through a fake claim about the Beijing Olympics being cancelled.

"There mustn't be much going on in the world today as the Nuwar [Storm] spammers have moved from jumping on real news of natural disasters and current affairs to creating their own fictional events," noted McGhee.

"This high volume spam campaign is using some wacky subjects to lure people into clicking on the links."