Just hours after Michael Jackson died yesterday, spam with subject lines claiming to have “exclusive information” on his death began flooding the net. The emails don’t contain any malicious links or attachments but seem to be an attempt to collect emails for a future attack. Researchers say anyone that replies to the spam will likely have their address harvested and that it wouldn’t be surprising to see future spams containing links to malicious payloads masquerading as exclusive video of Jackson’s last moments or autopsy photos.

News of the pop icon’s tragic death from what appears to be a sudden cardiac arrest caused an overwhelming spike in traffic that crashed Google, Wikipedia, AIM and Twitter for short periods and caused Facebook to slow to a crawl. Spammers and scammers are jumping at the chance to take advantage of all that traffic. Exploiting headlines and holidays is one of their favorite tricks. The last big headline they used was the Swine Flu outbreak, and before that President Obama’s inauguration.

Security experts are advising people to get their news only from reputable sources, and it goes without saying that you should never ever reply to a spam message. At best it will just bounce back due to a faked header, at worst it’ll just get you put on a list of people that respond to spam, meaning you’ll become a prime target for spammers.