14 DAY TRIAL // Electoral Cyber crime started last October, when the first wave of spam 'advertising' for a candidate was released into the wild. And the wildly election hype that the spammers were counting on did not fail to provide, Ron Paul's supporters falling for the trick. It was later linked to an Ukrainian botnet, but it was more or less pointless for those infected with the Srizbi Trojan.
The same Trojan is now being pushed up front, but this time Democrats are its target, as Senator Hilary Rodham Clinton is the front of the emails containing the malware. "Hilary Clinton visited her campaign headquarters in Virginia and did satellite interviews, looking beyond Tuesday's trio of contests and touting the importance of a March 4 vote in Ohio. Full video. Download it now!" the message reads. Should you click on the download link, a file entitled "mpg.exe" would actually download and install the formerly mentioned Srizbi Trojan. As with most of the spam malware, getting infected is a sure means of turning your PC into a spam-sending hazard, a part of a botnet.
Despite the huge potential that the elections have for spammers, they have chosen so far to not prominently use it. Oliver Friedrichs, the director of Symantec's security response team and a writer on electoral cyber crime told PC World that "I think [hackers] are still a little skittish. The high visibility of the federal elections makes them cautious about stepping into it. [?] The scale of an election is such that any potential disruption will clearly gather all the strength of all law enforcement."
It's strange they haven't gone for it already, when looking back at the way they exploited the opportunity provided to them by the Hurricane Katrina charities. "Maybe it's just too early. Maybe we'll see more [phishing] after the primaries are over," Friedrichs said.