Be alert to the ‘CNN Alert’!

Many of you may have received a SPAM email with the subject line, “CNN Alerts: My Custom Alert”.   This turned up in  my personal email folder. It was a very authentic looking email.  I thought it clever as, whilst I do not use the CNN site on a regular basis, I have used it now and again.  The interesting thing about this SPAM was that it did have a link to a legitimate CNN story about the discovery of the World’s smallest snake. Clicking on this would have given the email that feel of credibility.  The malicious link still exists in the e-mail but you must click the FULL STORY link to get there. 

The ‘FULL STORY’ link leads to a botnet of compromised machines which host a page prompting the user to download an updated version of Video ActiveX Object. If agreed to, you’ll download ‘adobe_flash.exe’ which is detected by us here at Symantec as ‘Downloader’.

August 11, 2008 | Filed Under Security, Spam 

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