Spam News

News story as spam

Monday, January 12, 2009

Last week cybercriminals took advantage of the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict with an emailed CNN story containing an embedded malicious link.

In the story, the link promised to show a video about the conflict, but asked users to update their Adobe Flash Player to do so, SCMagazineus.com reports. The link is a Trojan SSL stealer, used to capture financial and personal information from machines.

The attack reportedly came from China and was first found on Thursday with at least 80,000 emails sent on the first day, according to the article. Since then, approximately 250,000 emails have been sent with the subject lines such as Israel offers short respites from strikes.

CNN.com has recognized the spam email problem and addressed the issue through its blog telling readers to delete the email if found in their inbox. However it may be difficult to quarantine the problem with security officials telling SCMagazineus.com the success of the attack rest on the authenticity of the email and subsequent fake news story with the malicious link.

Other security professionals say the phishing attack is particularly harrowing since it has the potential to empty out a bank account through a series of links instead of requiring users to enter the information themselves, DarkReading.com reports.