“CNN – The Daily Top 10″ Email Spam Leads To Spoof Sites
For the last couple of weeks, I have been inundated with email spam from CNN. It’s called “The Daily Top 10″ which comprises some of the top stories featured at CNN. The ironic thing about this is that I did not subscribe to this. In fact, I don’t even watch or read CNN – I get my main news from Fox News.
Here is the screenshot of what it looks like:
If you can see at the very bottom, there is an unsubscribe link. In most cases when you get email spam, you do not want to use this function as it only tells the spammer that your email address is real. In this case, I figure it is CNN so I utilize it. It even takes you to the CNN site and displays a message that your email address has been unsubscribed from their list.
However, the emails keep coming. And in my case, seeing that I run multiple web sits and have multiple email addresses, it comes a lot, that is to many of my email addresses.
Now normally I’d plead (or demand) here for CNN to stop email spamming me. However, here is the ironic part of this story. It is not CNN sending these daily top 10 lists. If you mouse over the links to the news stories (DON’T CLICK ON THEM), you will see that the stories do not link to the CNN site. In fact, they do not even link to stories at all but rather the URL back82.org/news/ (at least in one scenario). McAfee reports this as a spoof site or even sites which apparently attempt to download malware on your computer.
Yahoo Tech reports the following:
If you do click one of the links you’ll get an innocuous-looking CNN-branded video player and an error message with a notice “Video ActiveX Object Error. Your browser cannot play this video file.” The message then prompts you to install an ActiveX Object… which, of course, is actually a Trojan horse. You can read more about the specific threat here. (Essentially it opens a door to allow for even more malware to be installed.)
So, first and foremost, do not click on any of the stories unless you want a nasty virus. Trying to unsubscribe is not going to help either. Best thing you can do is to add this to your email spam filter rules or kill the email addresses you are receiving these at.
I got to say that this is one of the best spoofs I have seen in awhile. Unfortunately many people most likely click on the story links and if they do not have good virus protection, are soon sorry that they did.
About the Author: David Wallace, co-founder and CEO of SearchRank, is a recognized expert in the industry of search and social media marketing. Since 1997, David has been involved in developing successful search engine and social media marketing campaigns for large and small businesses. Follow 
Marcel Feenstra | Aug 7, 2008 | Reply
I, too, am getting many of these (I’ve already created a rule that deletes them as they come in). Note, however, that it’s *not* just the domain you mention that should be avoided; I looked at some of the e-mails and each pointed to a *different* spoof site…
Linda Bustos | Aug 7, 2008 | Reply
Yeah, I got this and clicked unsubscribe. Didn’t download anything though, and now my spam quarantine is catching all the subsequent ones.
PS, watch out for Twitter spammers too: http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2008/08/warning-hackers-using-sexy-girls-to-infect-twitter-users.html
Eriq | Aug 8, 2008 | Reply
I too have started receiving this spam as of one week ago. It’s highly frustrating, usually receiving a “CNN Daily Top 10″ email every 20-30 minutes. By the end of the day I’ll have 30 CNN Top 10 emails unless I’m cleaning up the inbox frequently.
I’ve never clicked on any of the story links (I don’t even look at them because I know they’re bad links) but I did hover my mouse over the unsubscribe link to see where it was going to. And indeed the unsubscribe link goes to CNN’s real website, like you said.
Seeing that the unsubscribe link goes to CNN’s official website, I decided to unsubscribe thnking that someone just put me on the list. But What could be a little deceiving is that when you unsubscribe from the “Daily Top 10″ from CNN’s official website, their website doesn’t tell you if you were actually subscribed in the first place–in other words it doesn’t kick back an error message saying that your email addresss wasn’t on the list.
Anyway it’s a new and highly annoying spam tactic. I swear if I could get my hands on the people causing this…
Jennifer | Aug 8, 2008 | Reply
I’ve been getting these too, and like others here I tried to unsub, to no avail. The spam keeps coming, so that’s when I googled “CNN spam,” and found this thread. Thanks for the clarification.
Ramondo Stallings | Aug 8, 2008 | Reply
I am also getting these emails and I knew there was something not right because usually when CNN sends something in the from section it says something.cnn.com or something like that but in the sent section there was this – CNN Alerts tnengias1969 @ holynames-sea.org…what? That was a huge red flag for me.
Kristina | Aug 10, 2008 | Reply
Ahh driving me crazy. I went to unsubscribe and it told me to sign up, but i had to get rid of it so i did but once i did there was no way to unsubscribe from emails, it says click the link in the email in the help section which took me to the sign in page. Ahhhh going in circles!!%$#%$!
James | Aug 15, 2008 | Reply
You get your main news from fox. you must be kidding me.
Robert | Aug 17, 2008 | Reply
I have been getting these e-mails for weeks now and can’t get rid of them. Glad I didn’t click on any of the links.
Frank Paolino | Aug 19, 2008 | Reply
This is a new twist on “headline spam”, where they try to get you to open it due to the headlines. I guess the crazy headlines (see IBM files for Bankruptcy at http://blog.maysoft.org/blog.nsf/d6plinks/FPAO-7H3J2L )
were not getting the “action” they desired.
Spammers reinvent themselves daily. I cannot count the number of times I had to investigate a legitimate message wondering if it was some new spam technique!
Nick Stamoulis | Aug 23, 2008 | Reply
I think these spammers have just about everyone’s email addresses – just about anyone we know is getting this spam… including myself.
b-train | Sep 8, 2008 | Reply
You get your news from FOX, and you click links in e-mails you didn’t subscribe to. I sense more than a tenuous connection here.