Beware of Fake Swine Flu Emails

by Frank Jovine on 12/02/2009 in Scams & Hoaxes, Security

Cyber criminals are sending spoof emails that look like they’re coming from “Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC),” according to a screen shot in McAfee’s post.h1n1

The subject lines come in various forms such as; “Your personal Vaccination Profile” or “Governmental registration program on the H1N1 vaccination.”

A link in the e-mail leads to a malicious website that looks very legitimate. The site prompts users to download a tool to create a vaccination profile. The URL for the site uses a very common tactic that makes the URL look genuine. For example – online.cdc.gov, but ending with a domain such as yhnbad.com.im.

How to protect yourself from this scam

If you use Firefox, you can download the add-on Locationbar2. The Locationbar add-on for Firefox 3 makes a small, focused and very smart change to the browser. It highlights the domain name in a Web page URL to make it easy to spot in long Web site addresses.

The move helps defeat the common Phishing tactic of using long and convoluted URLs that might start with what looks like a bank site address, throw in a bunch of symbols and other characters, and effectively bury the real domain.

Be very careful on what links you click in an email!

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9 Responses to “Beware of Fake Swine Flu Emails”

  1. BunnygotBlog

    Dec 3rd, 2009

    wow~ thanks for informing us about this.

    • Frank J

      Dec 3rd, 2009

      Bunny,

      Thank you dear and as always thank you for the kind words.

  2. Gary Smith

    Dec 3rd, 2009

    Thanks for telling us this.

    I knew this since I have got many of these spams but it will be helpful for other people.

    • Frank J

      Dec 3rd, 2009

      Gary,

      You are welcome and I appreciate the comment.

  3. Jake

    Dec 4th, 2009

    I’ve actually had two people tell me they’ve received fake swine flu emails in the past day. I’ll be sure to pass this information onto them – useful as always!

    • Frank J

      Dec 4th, 2009

      Jake,

      This is just the beginning and there will be a flood of these emails during the XMas holiday.

  4. mc

    Dec 4th, 2009

    Will look out for this, in this day and age you always get spoof emails its sad really :/

  5. Jeff

    Dec 7th, 2009

    My mom emailed me the other day & asked me about it, I told her to delete it fast.

    • Frank J

      Dec 7th, 2009

      Jeff,

      Good move!