14 DAY TRIAL // Security company BitDefender announced today that its spam filters managed to discover and block an impressive campaign of unsolicited email messages which are usually concerning Ron Paul, one of the US Presidential candidates. According to BitDefender, the messages are coming from multiple countries and were all blocked by the company's filters. Since they are sent by several sources, the spam campaign might be based on bots which deliver the unsolicited content from lots of computers. Moreover, the information appearing in the email headers seems to be false, which only demonstrates that the messages are actually fake and not sent by an official person.
"We haven't observed any previous cases of using spam to try and influence a presidential campaign, in the USA or elsewhere," stated Vlad Valceanu, head of BitDefender's antispam unit. "It remains to be seen what impact (if any) this incident has on the outcome of the election, but it's certainly a worrying incident, as people of other political inclinations may feel compelled to counter with some spam of their own."
The spam campaigns tend to become more and more dangerous for our computers, most of the messages delivered through them being equipped with malicious attachments aiming to infect the victims' computers. A few days ago, it was reported that a PDF spamming campaign assaulted the systems from all around the world, attempting to infect the computers and trying to turn them into bots for supporting the malicious activities.
A spam campaign can be easily expanded all over the world because many of them install malicious files on users' computers, which then turn the machines into bots, being used at a later time for other attacks. There's not much we can do at this time to solve the problem, because besides spam filters and a software solution which can detect and block the download of infected attachments, no one can defend our systems.