Welcome to MSDN Blogs Sign in | Join | Help

Terry Zink's Anti-spam Blog

Protecting your mail from the scum of the internet
Quickly morphing CNN spam

The spam outbreak "from" CNN the occurred this past week has morphed into a new breed:

image

It appears that the spammers have learned from previous mistakes because this one is a little slicker.

In the body contents, just like the old one it contains links to valid messages and a single payoff (the link to Full Story which contains a payload to a virus or spam).  However, the message source is where we see how the spammers have evolved.

The previous spam campaign contained some textbook errors which I won't go into on this blog.  The headers in this one are a little cleaner but again, they are using the spoofing technique in order to get their payload delivered.

Posted: Friday, August 08, 2008 10:28 AM by tzink
Filed under:

Comments

Richard Aberdeen said:

I clicked on the "unsubscribe" link at the bottom of the original "Top 10" phishing scam, thinking that I had inadvertently signed up for a daily top 10 from CNN, because I often visit that page to catch up on the news.

Does anybody know if clicking on this unsubscribe link could cause a virus to activate and if so, is there any known solution out there to get rid of it?

Sincerely,

Richard Aberdeen

www.FreedomTracks.com

# August 9, 2008 7:10 PM

Jason said:

Great. Now how to I stop receiving these messages everyday?

# August 11, 2008 9:34 AM

Chris said:

Richard - The links at the bottom (unsubscribe, etc.) are legitimate; I went to them and tested them against navigating to the same pages from CNN.com itself.  It's just the news story links that are wonky.

# August 11, 2008 4:53 PM

J. Leyden said:

I clicked on a link to a news story after a few too many drinks, but I can't for the life of me remember whether I allowed the Flash plugin to install (I think I just killed the browser). How can I be sure?

# August 13, 2008 10:38 AM
Leave a Comment

(required) 

(required) 

(optional)

(required) 

Comment Notification

If you would like to receive an email when updates are made to this post, please register here

Subscribe to this post's comments using RSS

Page view tracker