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News consumers warned of rogue e-mails

Eager news consumers have been warned to watch out for e-mail scams claiming to be from US news providers or they risk being exposed to online threats.

According to online security experts, cyber crooks are flooding the internet with spoofed emails in the neighbourhood of two million rogue e-mails per hour claiming to be from news provider MSNBC.

This follows a switch by the hackers behind the campaign from earlier news alert emails purporting to be from CNN bearing breaking news tags, reports eweek.com.

According to the website, some of the spoof emails state: "msnbc.com - BREAKING NEWS: McCain told lies to win votes" and "msnbc.com - BREAKING NEWS: Jerry Yang relinquishes control over Yahoo."

"It has all the hallmarks of the previous attack," said Graham Cluley from Sophos.

He said this was a "significant attack" due to the sheer volume of the e-mails which at some point equalled all the amount of spam the company was seeing in their traps.

Users have been warned to avoid clicking on links on e-mails to prevent compromising their online security.

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