Cyber Criminals Spamming Invitations to DDoS US President’s Website

Internet fraudsters are sending bulk spam mails to those opposing President Obama as they exploit the heated discussion across the nation regarding the president's new healthcare schemes, reports Proofpoint, provider of e-mail security, as reported by SCMagazineUS on August 19, 2009.

Furthermore, it is reported that the e-mail hitting users' inboxes show the caption: "Here You can buy DDoS," while the message body states that for users who don't like Obama could join in the task of waging a DDoS campaign on his website, using given installs.

Keith Crosley, Director of Market Development, Proofpoint, said that the e-mail contained a link, which pointed to a website from where users could supposedly download a program for the cyber attack, as reported by SCMagazineUS.

Crosley further said that although it wasn't clear whether the download could be used for launching an assault on the website of the President or not, one thing was evident that the file offered for download was indeed a malware.

Moreover, the security officials at Proofpoint explain that visitors accessing the somewhat strange website obtained from the spam outbreak are invited for collecting regular updates from the malicious site, and simultaneously warned that security programs might detect the download as a malicious program, and so quarantine it.

Scott Panzer, Lead Data Engineer, Proofpoint, states that many other spam schemes also exist, with some having porn-related messages, and these are being launched to attract traffic to the website in discussion. According to him, this is typical malware, which makes a computer a component of a botnet, as reported by SCMagazineUS on August 19, 2009.

Furthermore, experts at Proofpoint observe that the current junk e-mails demonstrate how effectively cyber criminals, particularly spammers, follow popular trends for launching sophisticated attacks against e-mail users to distribute their malicious payloads.

In the meantime, a similar episode took place in Iran as a reaction to the results of the presidential election in June 2009 when hackers launched DDoS (distributed denial of service) assaults targeting websites of the Tehran government and through Twitter motivated the general public to do the same.

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» SPAMfighter News - 9/5/2009