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L.N. Revathy

Coimbatore, Nov. 6 While people across the globe were watching the happenings in the US – Mr Barack Obama’s victory as the 44th US President and the crowd waiting in awe to watch his acceptance speech live, cyber criminals sought to capitalise the moment with mass malicious email campaign.

Within seven hours of Mr Obama’s acceptance speech, Websense Security Labs detected over 25,000 spam mails doing the round. “There were many variations of the attack and the number of emails were growing in thousands every hour,” Mr Surinder Singh, Director (SAARC), Websense Inc, told Business Line.

The attackers were directing recipients to click on a link to view a video showing an interview with the advisors to the US President-elect Mr Obama or view a portion of his acceptance speech. Clicking on the link directed users to a malicious Web site infected with information-stealing malware.

In some variations of the email attack, the cyber criminals used renowned publishing names such as ‘Time Magazine’ to encourage users click on the links. Some attacks contained links to a file ‘BarackObama.exe’, which was hosted on a compromised travel site.

“The file basically is an information-stealing Trojan Horse downloader. Upon execution, files called ‘system.exe’ and ‘firewall.exe’ are dropped into the victim’s system directory and a phishing kit is unpacked locally, dropping files bound to startup,” he explained.

Asked from where the attack emanated, he said “we are still tracking. To conduct a fall in the US, attackers use a server hosted else where, say Russia or some other far off land.”

The survey findings show that 60 per cent of the top 100 most popular Web sites have either hosted or been involved in malicious activity in the first half of 2008 and 87 per cent of email messages were spam.

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