US President Barack Obama has been the latest victim of cyber-criminals. Symantec's Threat Intelligence team detected a new wave of malicious spam messages with a presidential theme.
The e-mails all claim the newly installed president has refused to take up the position of the leader of the US. A statement from Symantec says the contaminated e-mails contained links to a Web site that looks like president Obama and vice-president Joseph Biden's presidential campaign site from last year.
Even if one's computer is fully patched, the Web site tries to get the better of users' curiosity, with every downloadable file containing malicious content, the security developer continues. The files have a variety of names such as usa.exe, obamanew.exe, pdf.exe, statement.exe, barackblog.exe, and barackspeech.exe, yet each leads to the same malware.
The latest menace
Symantec says the new threat, W32.waledac, uses social engineering techniques to get unsuspecting users to click on hyperlinks contained within e-mails, leading to another site filled with malicious links.
The security developer warns even though W32.waledac is not a high-risk threat, users may be quick to click on a link to get to the fake breaking news, forgetting about potential hazards. The same piece of malicious software was used as part of Christmas-related threats late last year.
Once the malicious code has infected a machine, it can harvest sensitive information on the computer, turn it into a spam zombie and establish a back door on the PC that will allow it to be remotely accessed, Symantec concludes.
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