Spam Alert: Huge Volumes of Fake CNN News Updates

Heads up on a new, very high volume Fake CNN News Update spam run that is making the rounds.  The subject of the email is "CNN.com Daily Top 10."  Our Threat Operations Center has seen over 5 million of these just in the last hour alone and over 80 million in the last 24 hours. 

Below is a screen shot of the message. 




Over the last few weeks we have been seeing large spam runs of what we are calling single-line spam where an email contains a brief lure based on fake news headlines such as "US track team disqualified from Olympics" or "Beijing Olympics postponed indefinitely" followed by a link.  The web site linked to in the message is a link to a "video codec" (er, malware) that the user is prompted to download in order to view the online video.

The tactic being used here is similar to what we saw with the Porntube malware that we saw back in June (click here for original Porntube blog post) where the user is prompted to download the video codec when the page initially loads.  If the user clicks "Cancel" to not download the codec, another popup is presented where the user is told that they have to download the codec to view the video.  This endless loop continues until the user kills their browser session at the operating system level or installs the "codec." 

This new CNN tactic is likely to be more successful than the single-line spam tactic that we had been seeing over the past several weeks as this message looks like it could be an news update email sent by CNN.  This new message also attempts to trick the user into believing that they signed up to receive it because of their email preference settings at the CNN web site.  If you see this message come into your inbox, delete it immediately.