Watch out for the Obama botnet
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Blog, Spam, Security on
Everyone is getting excited by the upcoming Barack Obama Presidential inauguration. Everyone, including the Obama spammers it would seem. With less than 24 hours to go until the historic inauguration ceremony, the spammers are busy getting malware loaded messages out with headlines promising amazing news that Obama is standing down before stepping up.
Apparently, if the spammers are to be believed, Obama does not want the responsibility of saving a sinking ship and so has decided to refuse to accept the US Presidency. Of course, every message comes with a link promising the official news from the man himself, and which takes the unsuspecting to a cloned version of the Obama campaign website which comes with a few surprises. The main one being the opportunity to get infected with the Waledec botnet.
Such blended threats are nothing new, however the fact that the whole world is currently reaching something of a climax as far as Obama-madness is concerned is clearly worrying. Given the appetite for any Obama news right now the chances are high that people will let their guards down and the malware in. Waledec is a pretty new botnet, and thought to be the latest creation from the people behind the Storm botnet. It is only a month old, but is continuing to operate in the same way as Storm before it.
“Barack Obama’s inauguration is just one day away. Clearly, there is significant public interest in an event as historic and anticipated as this and the spammers are exploiting it. Spammers have used social engineering ploys like this time and time again to entice spam recipients into clicking on links without thinking. These headlines are designed to catch out recipients by shocking them with the unbelievable,” explained Phil Hay, senior threat analyst for the Marshal8e6 TRACE Labs.
Rated: 60% (2 votes)
Loading ...Comment by - October 5, 2009 on 7:41 am
And before I claim about my hard work for gaining more traffic.
Comment by - November 3, 2009 on 7:10 am
Both the UPI article and the USA Today article have major errors. Both misidentify the worm as an “Internet” worm or a “computer” worm. It is neither. It is a Windows worm.
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