Tweet

With all of the fanfare Senator Barack Obama has been receiving — the race for the in the U.S. Democratic presidential nomination is becoming ever more close — it was only a matter of time until spammers and cyber criminals began to employ his popularity to leverage their malicious activities.

A new spam run that TrendLabs Content Security has recently come across features spammed email messages that entice readers to click a link, which supposedly has a video of Obama’s confessions regarding his “transsexual affairs.” The links lead to the download of the file Barack_Obama-videostream.v182.exe, which Trend Micro detects as BKDR_AGENT.ABTQ.

The upcoming U.S. elections have been targeted by spammers before.

Senator Hillary Clinton, Obama’s main rival in the Democratic presidential nomination race, also became the subject of spamming activities last February, while another candidate, Congressman Ron Paul, had been featured in 2008 U.S. election spam’s first salvo back in November. The two early spam runs, however, sounded in favor of the presidential hopefuls (despite installing malware onto systems). On the other hand, Barack Obama does not seem to have the spammers’ support in this spam run, which alludes to scandalous affairs in an effort to socially-engineer users to peruse salacious content.

Trend Micro users are already protected from this threat, as TrendLabs Content Security already blocks the emails.