Spammers wasted no time in profiting from Barack Obama's victory in the White House race and launched several spam campaigns. The most wide spread one invites users to watch the newly elected president's acceptance speech on a fake website that serves them a password stealing Trojan hidden as Adobe_flash9.exe.

The spam e-mails coming from various spoofed addresses display a variety of subjects like “Obama win preferred in world poll”, “Obama's Win Reshapes the Race”, “USA Election 2008 Results”. They all invite users to watch a video of Obama's speech hosted on a page supposedly from the American Government Official Website. The page fakes the U.S. Department of State's America.gov website and the user is prompted to download and install Adobe_flash9.exe in order to view the video.

The executable file installs a Trojan detected as Mal/Behav-027 by Sophos or Trojan-PSW:W32/Papras.CL by F-Secure. According to virus analysts, this Trojan features a rootkit component, backdoor functionality, password stealing capabilities and keylogging. It uploads the stolen information to a server located in Kiev, Ukraine.

Graham Cluley, Senior Technology Consultant for security vendor Sophos, warns about the large scale nature of this campaign. “The emails, which have subject lines such as 'Obama win preferred in world poll' and claim to come from news@president.com, have accounted for approximately 60% of all malicious spam seen by SophosLabs in the last hour,” he wrote on his blog.

Adam O'Donnell of Cloudmark, announced that the company offering messaging security solutions “estimated the prevalence of this particular spam strain to be on the order of tens of millions”. Alex Eckelberry, CEO of Sunbelt Software, also warned about this spam campaign. “Be careful, alert your users, this thing is tricky,” he said and added that “I’m sure more to come”.

This doesn't mean that if John McCain had won, spammers wouldn't have been so eager to capitalize on his victory. Spammers will always take advantage of the notoriety of individuals or the publicity of certain events. The U.S. presidential election is highly appealing to them, regardless of the winner. However, giving the fact that Obama enjoys greater popularity world-wide compared to his former counter-candidate, it's safe to assume that the number of potential victims is far greater than it would have been otherwise.