Fake BBC emails lead to Blackhole, Zeus

Spam emails supposedly coming from CNN and the BBC and delivering links to trending news stories have once again become the preferred way for malware peddlers to lure recipients to malicious sites.

A few weeks ago the emails were all about the new Pope. In the last week or so, the attackers are misusing the public’s interest in the economic crisis in Cyprus (click on the screenshot to enlarge it):

As you can observe, the email claims to have been was sent by the BBC on behalf of a friend of the user through their Email a Friend service.

Unfortunately, the offered links do not lead to a BBC site – something that can be discovered by hovering with the mouse pointer over them – but to compromised websites hosting the Blackhole exploit kit and serving client-side exploits.

According to Webroot, the final malicious payload is a variant of the Zeus banking Trojan.