More News from Rustock

Rustock is at it again. After sending malicious spam under the guise of fake news updates pretending to be from CNN and MSNBC in August, Rustock has now come up with another spamming template using CBS News. But, the odd thing is, the message is not news-like.  Instead it comes with a clickable image, downloaded from the web, advertising an online pharmacy rather than fake news links.

This would seem to defeat the purpose entirely. The malicious spam sent during August provided links to malware infected websites and used a news headline theme to entice recipients into clicking on the links to infect themselves. In this latest fake CBS News campaign there is no convincing ruse, it is readily apparent that the nature of these messages is spam.

The only compelling feature of these messages is subject lines following the theme of the U.S. Presidential elections. Obviously the spammers are counting on the hype of the 2008 elections to lure recipients into opening the message.

We can only surmise that the intent of these messages is to use the fake news headlines to make the spam look legitimate at first glance and get their advertising in front of email users. Clicking on any of the links within the message will take you to an online pharmacy selling sex-enhancement drugs. 

MailMarshal Customers are protected from this latest spam with SpamCensor 276.