Spammers Target Users’ Personal Information Through Obama Campaigns

MessageLabs, an Internet security company, reported on June 17, 2008 that a bogus e-mail, from two clusters of spam campaigns, uses the typical celebrity-scandal headline - "Scandal rocks Obama as lurid sex video leaked" - to catch the reader's attention.

The first of the two campaigns has been responsible for 18% of spam during the week June 11-17, 2008 and is an another blow to the Obama spam campaigns from the vicious part of the Web world. In April 2008, a programming fault allows Hillary Clinton supporters to divert a page of Obama's Website towards Clinton's. However, today's techniques of Web attacks could result in far more grave consequences.

The Security Researchers at MessageLabs said that while one of the two spam campaigns uses the term "sex", other says offensively that Obama is involving himself in cheap businesses. Also, the first spam mail, which talks about Obama's sex scandal, carries a link pointing to different malicious Websites.

These Websites ask viewers to download a certain program from the Internet that would allow them to run the videos. But, when users follow the instructions of the phony and malicious messages, they are led to porn Websites that deliver malware.

Also, according to MessageLabs, if end-users attempt to download anything from these sites, they might expose their computers to dangerous virus or other malware attacks. Thus, users are suggested to avoid clicking on the links in the e-mails, as they are hoax and designed to steal users' personal information.

The second phony e-mail, which resembles any conventional spam campaign, appears to spoof Barack Obama's supporter domains. MessageLabs noted that a cluster of spam mails seems to advertise and encourage purchase of items like watches. But, the domain addresses from where these e-mails originate are barackobamaisyournewbicycle.com and barackobamaismyhomeboy.com.

Moreover, according to MessageLabs, spammers are targeting the unwary users by exploiting current happenings that attract large numbers of users. In a related news, Sophos, in the third week of June 2008, warned computer users of unsolicited e-mails that were maliciously spamming messages claiming that another earthquake had occurred in China that could prevent the upcoming Olympic Games.

Related article: Spammers Continue their Campaigns Successfully

» SPAMfighter News - 7/5/2008