Ann Marie McNally died when her car and a BPD cruiser hit each other in South Boston in November. Yet she lives on because hackers, for some strange reason, are using her name as a way to draw people to their own sites.

Louise Story at the New York Times spoke with McNally's friends and family because several of them thought they found a video for her memorial service on the web. The memorials were actually sites that try to get people to download spyware.

More after the jump! Image of an old-school computer from Wikimedia Commons.

Another Google search suggests that it will show "Shocking Pictures" of McNally's death, only to go to a Xomba page with a bunch of pay-per-click ads and a single link to a Herald story. Xomba is a site that says it allows people to "get paid to write." If anyone has told you that you can get paid to write, you should be suspicious.

Surely, this has happened to other people who just wanted to remember a loved one and then found someone using their death to hack into your computer. The Xomba part of the story is slightly less flagrant, but it's misleading.

When the crash took place, the Herald caused a controversy among its commenters for its photos of the crash scene. The photo showed legs sticking out of McNally's car, but the Herald clarified that the legs belonged to a rescue worker. Someone local must have seen that particular story about McNally, knew it would draw eyeballs, and took advantage of it.