Liz Taylor murdered?
By on
August 14th, 2008
No, probably––thankfully––not. In fact, despite recent reports that the 76 year-old Hollywood icon was on her death bed, she probably hasn’t even died of natural causes.
With dozens 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 approach to online grifting: fake 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” (see above”) — and even the alarming, “Europeans dislike Americans attitudes [sic].”
Graham Cluey, a security specialist at Sophos, made a video about a new trend of CNN News Alerts like “Michael Jackson is sued by his own dog”–that lure users to a rogue site that will attempt to infect their computers with malicious software posing as a video 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 give me the option to click on the nasty links.
At his security blog, Gary Warner has a list of the titillating 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 [sic].”
Popularity: 1% [?]
A very dirty way of spamming.
I hope they get in jail for this.
Quite a few computers may be infected, anyone has heard of any figures?