cnn

This Phish Isn't Biting

As I checked my email inbox this afternoon, I discovered an email which was supposedly sent from CNN. The subject line was CNN Alerts: My Custom Alert. The problem is, I’ve never configured custom alerts on the CNN webpage. However, The email looks very legitimate and I almost clicked on the links until I noticed that the FULL STORY link points to a site other than CNN. Check out this screenshot.

I’ve never received a phishing email which has appeared to originate from CNN. I’ve received similar looking emails from Paypal, Ebay, Chase bank, Bank Of America, etc. They almost fooled me on this attempt.

The funny thing is, when I typed in the URL of the full story link into Google, I checked out the search result for the McAfee Site Advisor and according to them, the site is just fine, no significant problems found.

Here is what I find disturbing. How many people do you think may have been as careful as I was with this link and checked out the site advisor page only to see that there was not any problems associated with the site thus, they went ahead and clicked on the link? Thankfully, the comments section of the McAfee post filled me in on the details:

“…didn’t find any significant problems.” Better look harder!!!
CNN.com Daily Top 10 spam has disguised links to <http://www.blackhawkk9.com/cnntop.html&gt; concerning which:
DANGEROUS: LinkScanner Online has found [Trojan Fake Codec]
Yeah, as well as clicking the fake link of your choice they want you to download a trojan loader, submit your machine to a botnet and further their aims to rule the observable universe (nice work if you can get it).

Name: blackhawkk9.com
Address: 68.178.211.52
(Owned by GoDaddy.com Inc)
Nameservers:
ns17.domaincontrol.com 64.202.165
ns18.domaincontrol.com 208.109.255.9

Registrar: GoDaddy.com Inc

Also, I sent word about this email on Twitter and many other people have reported receiving the same thing.

Word of warning, do not click on the links within this email. Immediately send it to the trash bin or your spam folder or simply delete it. Although this email smelled phishy, this phish almost took the bait.

This Phish Isn’t Biting

As I checked my email inbox this afternoon, I discovered an email which was supposedly sent from CNN. The subject line was CNN Alerts: My Custom Alert. The problem is, I’ve never configured custom alerts on the CNN webpage. However, The email looks very legitimate and I almost clicked on the links until I noticed that the FULL STORY link points to a site other than CNN. Check out this screenshot.

I’ve never received a phishing email which has appeared to originate from CNN. I’ve received similar looking emails from Paypal, Ebay, Chase bank, Bank Of America, etc. They almost fooled me on this attempt.

The funny thing is, when I typed in the URL of the full story link into Google, I checked out the search result for the McAfee Site Advisor and according to them, the site is just fine, no significant problems found.

Here is what I find disturbing. How many people do you think may have been as careful as I was with this link and checked out the site advisor page only to see that there was not any problems associated with the site thus, they went ahead and clicked on the link? Thankfully, the comments section of the McAfee post filled me in on the details:

“…didn’t find any significant problems.” Better look harder!!!
CNN.com Daily Top 10 spam has disguised links to <http://www.blackhawkk9.com/cnntop.html&gt; concerning which:
DANGEROUS: LinkScanner Online has found [Trojan Fake Codec]
Yeah, as well as clicking the fake link of your choice they want you to download a trojan loader, submit your machine to a botnet and further their aims to rule the observable universe (nice work if you can get it).

Name: blackhawkk9.com
Address: 68.178.211.52
(Owned by GoDaddy.com Inc)
Nameservers:
ns17.domaincontrol.com 64.202.165
ns18.domaincontrol.com 208.109.255.9

Registrar: GoDaddy.com Inc

Also, I sent word about this email on Twitter and many other people have reported receiving the same thing.

Word of warning, do not click on the links within this email. Immediately send it to the trash bin or your spam folder or simply delete it. Although this email smelled phishy, this phish almost took the bait.

CNN Hops On The 2.0 Bandwagon

CNN Redesigns Their Site With A Web 2.0 LookCNN.com launched their redesigned web site over the weekend. The new site features one-page integrated story-telling, the largest Flash video player of its kind, local coverage, better weather, blog links, commenting, and free live video for breaking news.

Judging by the comments on the BehindTheScenes CNN Blog, quite a number of people do not like the redesign. Not surprising, considering people do not like the idea of change, especially after they have become accustomed to a certain way of seeing things.

The new CNN site definitely has a clean look but I am not too keen on the amount of gray and white used through out the site. I think if CNN wanted to really impress their viewers, they would make CNN an editable start page. Using Ajax and all sorts of other Web 2.0 goodness, CNN could of allowed users to disable or enable widgets which contained different sections of the news. By using this method, CNN probably could of pleased the majority of people by allowing the customization of the main page so that users would only see items that they were interested in. At the very least, they could of created a minimize/maximize feature on the different modules located on the front page. With that being said, I must also add that the video player on CNN is very nice! The video area is large and the quality of the video footage seems to be pretty good.

Visit CNN.com to check out their new design. When your done, come back here and leave an opinion.