Cyber Criminals Hitch Ride on US Election News

By Greg McNevin

November 7, 2008: As to be expected, spammers and malware writers have attempted to jump on board the wave of news surrounding President-elect Barack Obama, with a veritable tsunami of malicious Obama emails flooding inboxes around the world.

The emails promise everything from up to the minute election news and videos of speeches, however, as is usually the case with unsolicited email all are riddled with viruses and malware.

Sophos, Cloudmark and a host of other anti-virus firms are reporting stellar virus outbreaks, with volumes reportedly leaping as confirmation of Obama’s win hit news outlets.

“The hackers are taking advantage of Obama-mania,” said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for SophosLabs in a blog posting. “So many people have been excited or interested in [the US election], that they might be susceptible to it.”

Researchers at Websense have reported that at least 25,000 emails containing a Trojan virus masking itself as a Adobe flash installer (required to watch phoney acceptance speech videos) have passed through its system, and worse still according to The Washington Post, scans of infected emails at Virustotal.com show that less than half of the anti-virus solutions out there detected the virus.

Emails have been coming from addresses such as news@president.com, and news@bbc.com, and contain a link to a malicious website hosting the shoddy software.

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