There are various forms of fake e-mail messages appearing as if they were sent by CNN as breaking news alerts. These e-mails were not sent by CNN and, if you click on any of the links in them, you will be taken to maliciously compromised websites. These compromised websites have the malicious Blackhole Exploit Kit which is used by hackers and scammers to infect computers with multiple malwares when visited.
The subject of these fake e-mail messages is "CNN Breaking News" and contains the following fake news alerts:
“Opinion: Family sued new Pope. Exclusive!”
“Opinion: New pope tries to shake off the past”
“Opinion: Can New-Pope Benedict be Sued for the Sex Abuse Cases?”
Also, there have been reports of other fake breaking news alerts where BBC or Reuters is used instead of CNN.
Some of these messages have the following news alert:
"Cyprus: bank-Levy Passage in Doubt as EU Shows Aggression"
Remember, these malicious links that take you to these compromised websites, may also start appearing on popular social networking websites such as Facebook and Twitter.
For most computer users, it is difficult to tell if an e-mail message is legitimate or not. Therefore, I recommend that you do not click on the links in a suspicious e-mail message.instead, visit the website directly, by typing the name of the website address in your browser's address bar or use a bookmark that you have already created.
Here is a very important tip:
If you receive an e-mail message in the form of an alert or any other forms of notification, from a website that you did not sign up or register with to receive, it is most often a bogus e-mail.