November 6, 2008 by Matt Thomas
Security sources claim that directly following Barack Obama’s win in the presidential election on Tuesday, a malicious Malware campaign was initiated. The campaign aimed to steal personal information from internet users by creating an Obama related Trojan to exploit the popularity of the president-elect and the huge web traffic surrounding him.
It isn’t an isolated case either. According to security experts, spam relating to Obama has made up about 60 per cent of all spam messages, making this a truly global attack, ironically facilitated by the man who has been called ‘the first global president.’ Graham Cluley, Sophos Labs’ senior technology consultant said, “The hackers are taking advantage of Obama-mania.”
Specifically Malware attackers are using widespread post-election interest to their advantage by sending a completely legitimate looking email, claiming to offer news of Obama’s win. The email then offers a link to view ‘Obama’s Victory Speech.’ However, ‘to view the link’ users are required to download information stealing software which, once initiated, can send their information to one or many control centres.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, a user’s computer can also be added to a botnet – a network designed to help email Spam to yet more computers.
As always, our advice is to be very cautious about clicking on links in unsolicited emails. If in doubt, don’t click.
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