Fergie's Tech Blog

Malware Piggybacks on Obama Win

Brian Krebs writes on Security Fix:

Cyber criminals are blasting out massive amounts of spam touting a video of President-elect Barack Obama's victory speech. Recipients who click the included link are taken to a site that prompts visitors to install an Adobe Flash Player update. The bogus update, however, is actually a data-stealing Trojan horse.

The messages, with such subject lines as "election results winner," and "the new president's cabinet?", and "fear of a black president," direct recipients to a site featuring a picture of Obama beneath an official U.S. government seal and the domain name america.gov (the real domain names used to host these fraudulent sites appear to differ from message to message). Beside Obama's visage is an embedded video player that reads "loading player." A few seconds after the site loads, the visitor is prompted to download the malware, disguised as "adobe_flash9.exe".

More here.

Note: Also noted over on the Sunbelt Software Blog. -ferg

posted by Fergie @ 11/05/2008 12:17:00 PM