Hillary Clinton spam sighted in the wild

[apnu]

Source: Network World

Hillary Clinton spam sighted in the wild
Symantec warns of bogus "Hillary Clinton video" spam

By Ellen Messmer, Network World, 02/14/08

The Hillary Clinton election campaign is being exploited in a spam message that tries to trick users into downloading a Trojan to their desktops by pretending to offer a link to a video of a Hillary Clinton campaign speech. "It's the first time we've seen spam like this targeting Hillary Clinton," says Doug Bowers, Symantec's senior director of anti-abuse engineering, who says the spam message, still not seen in large volumes, was first spotted today.

The spam, which has the subject line "Hillary Clinton Video!!" offers users a link promising a video of the presidential candidate giving a speech. In reality, clicking on it would cause a Trojan to be downloaded to compromise the victim's machine for the purpose of sending more spam.

The U.S. presidential campaign is in full swing, but other than Hillary Clinton, the only other candidate's name being abused for malware purposes in this way is Ron Paul, according to Symantec. So far, neither Barack Obama nor John McCain, viewed as party frontrunners, have had their names exploited for malware.

Read more: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/021408-hillary-clinton-spam.html?nladname=021508securityal&code=nlsecuritynewsal122943

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See the link for more info and links to Symantec for details and removal instructions.

I only hope this doesn't lead to GD Primaries nonsense about Obama hacking Clinton -- though I expect some to think that...

Be safe out there folks.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

1. I hope this isn't a harbinger of things to come n/t

[apnu]

2. It is, be sure of it.

The people who release these things take every opportunity for something new. I remember Tsunami spam/virus/trojan, mortgage crisis spam/virus/trojan, and the whole Christmas/New Years day spam/virus/trojan.

I expect at least one outbreak of McCain spam in the GE, and probably one for whoever our nominee is.

[Lerkfish]

3. reminds me of holy Joementum's cries of "hacker! hacker!"

[jmondine]

4. I have an image of cans of meat running through dense forest...

... yelling out, "Obama sucks!"