With wads of Nigerian lottery scammers now off the streets and better-informed Internet citizen perhaps a tad less likely to click on phishing emails, disaster relief solicitations and credit card ripoffs, the ever-inventive spammer-hacker community has pioneered a new overture to on-line grifting: postiche news alerts.
Maybe you've seen recent e-mails claiming to be from MSNBC and CNN with sensational headlines like "Elizabeth Taylor Found Murdered at Home" and "Mary-Kate Olsen guilty for Heath Ledger's Death" (find above") -- and regular the alarming, "Europeans disfavour Americans attitudes [sic]."
Graham Cluey, a protection specialist at Sophos, made a video about a new tendency of CNN News Alerts like "Michael Jackson is sued by his own dog"--that lure users to a rogue situation that will attempt to infect their computers with malicious software posing as a picture plug-in.
In my own e-mail account today, I counted 42 fake news e-mails--though Gmail is apparently catching on, as it refused to feed me the option to click on the awful links.�
At his security web log, Gary Warner has a list of the tickling headlines the phony CNN spammers are using -- some of which refer to actual stories -- like the "real"� 95-year-old Batman from Texas -- and others that don't, such as� "`Dark Knight' - download it instantly fo free [set]."
One more reason never to believe anything you read.
