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Online Scammers Creating Fake Local News to Attract Your Clicks

by Tim Stevens on March 17, 2009 at 10:56 AM

Scammers Create Supposedly Local News to Attract your Clicks
We hope that by now you've become adept at spotting spam and scam e-mails just by taking a quick glance at their subjects. Gross typos, egregiously bad grammar, and an over-abundance of exclamation points are a sure sign, but you're soon going to have to learn a few new tricks to avoid the most recent batch of scam e-mails, which are personalized to look like news reports local to your town.

The e-mails appear to come from friends and look to be asking if you're safe and healthy, with a link to a news story like the one pictured above, supposedly talking about the detonation of a nuclear bomb near the reader's hometown. The story, of course, is fake, customized to appear to be local to you thanks to the unique Internet address assigned to your machine, which Web sites can use to figure out what town you're connecting from.



Also fake is the Reuters look-alike site, which acts only as a portal to the Waledac virus -- the same one that got some serious play last month around Valentine's Day. Once installed, it does the usual Internet worm thing: Running in the background, watching what you do online, and sending itself to others.

As always, the only thing you can do is watch where you click, and if a site you think you can trust automatically prompts you to download something, make sure you're at the real thing and you're certain that you want that download before clicking to install. [From: CNET News]

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Tags: crime, e-mail scams, E-mailScams, online scams, OnlineScams, scam, scammer, security, virus, waledac

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