January 12, 2009

Fake CNN phishing site

Once again, the news is being used to encourage unsuspecting internet users visit news sites to see some breaking news, but as normal, these are just phishing emails hoping that people will visit the site and get caught up in trap.

In this case, the news story is making out that it comes from CNN, the story itself is a video related to the problems between Hamas and Israel, the email recipient is provided with a link to the news site.

As usual, this is a fake CNN site and once the visitor is on the site it asks them to download some additional software in order to view the video properly, this downloads a Trojan onto the visitor’s computer.

The software then looks for encrypted communications, these will mainly be for banking and other financial transactions, this data is then transmitted back to the bad guys who use this information to make money.

Source [Cnet]