Obama election-win sparks rise in malicious spam
Published: 06 Nov 2008 11:21 GMT
Within hours of the US presidential-election results, spam seen worldwide began incorporating the name and image of Barack Obama, according to various security vendors.
Sophos reported 60 percent of all spam seen by the lab on Wednesday was in some way Obama-related.
One piece of spam alleges to contain a link to video of Obama's acceptance speech. If you follow the video link within the email message you will be taken to a web page where you'll be asked to update your Adobe Flash Player with a file, adobe_flash9.exe, first. This is not an official Adobe update file and downloading this file may in turn infect your computer with a Trojan.
Sophos named the Trojan Mal/Behav-027. F-Secure named it W32/Papras.CL. Sunbelt Software also has a blog about this particular piece of spam.
Meanwhile, Websense is reporting a separate threat. An email appears to be an interview with the new president elect. The email features embedded links to a video site that attempts to install a file, BarackObama.exe. Downloading this file may infect your computer with a Trojan.
One of the spam messages using Obama's election win to entice people to download malware
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