CyberInsecure.com

Fraudsters Prey Upon Public Interest In Current Events to Launch Trojan Attacks On Fake CNN Site

RSA FraudAction Research Lab discovered yesterday a social engineering scam designed to lure people, via an email spam attack, to a fake news website designed to look like CNN.com. This “Cease-Fire Trojan Attack” attempts to bait readers leveraging recent news and “graphic and striking” images regarding the Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza.

The result of this attack is the infection of computers with a Trojan. The fake website is designed to look like CNN.com, but is not a legitimate CNN.com webpage nor is it associated with CNN, its parent company, or its affiliates in any manner.

The scam is yet another example of how adept fraudsters are in engineering attacks with near real-time response to breaking news. It also underscores the opportunistic nature of fraud purveyors who increasingly prey upon public interest and/or concern regarding national or global events of broad importance (such as the recent global economic crisis or the U.S. presidential election).

Infection by the Trojan is accomplished via a silent “drive-by-download” infection kit such as Neosploit, or via social engineering. If the Internet user clicks on the link within the email, they are directed to the fake website. The fake webpage designed and hosted by the online criminals, is embedded as a link within the spam attack email. This fake webpage includes another link to what appears to be a legitimate video but is actually a form of crimeware. When visitors click on the video, they get an error message asking them to install Adobe Flash Player 10 in order to play the video, and a link is provided. The associated and completely fake download is not a product of Adobe or its affiliates in any way.

The Trojan that is launched when the link to the fake software installation is accessed is called a Trojan “SSL stealer” that captures financial and personal information of the infected user found on their computer. This particular Trojan is not new or a newly advanced piece of crimeware. What is new is the socially engineered application of this Trojan that exploits users concerned about the recent events in Gaza.

Users should ignore unsolicited emails that ask them for personal information, or entice them to look at something interesting online – even if it seems “normal”, like an email from a friend, financial institution, or a social networking website.

RSA initiated the shutdown process to take down this attack and the site went offlie on the night of January 8th. The domain, as usual, was hosted in China.

Share this item with others:

Posted in Data Theft, Malware, Phishing, Scams, Spam |  Print This Post