Obama Takes Over Your Computer

Cyber criminals sent out millions of emails Wednesday touting Barack Obama’s electoral victory in an attempt to take over people’s computers.

The emails invite recipients to watch an “amazing” speech that Obama supposedly gave Wednesday. Clicking on the link provided takes people to a Web site that looks like one operated by the State Department, but is really operated by cyber criminals. In order to watch the speech, visitors are instructed to download the latest version of Adobe’s Flash video player – the most common video technology on the Internet, and a prompt most people have received in the past. In reality, the file is a piece of software that allows the cyber criminal to take over someone’s computer, and do things like steal personal information stored there or make the computer send out unsolicited spam emails.

Tech-security company Cloudmark has seen more than 10 million of the fake Obama emails over the last few hours. Sophos, another tech-security company, says that the email accounted for 60% of all malicious junk messages Wednesday. Cyber criminals often peg their attacks to current events – the collapse of the stock market, for example, or anything Paris Hilton does. But the amount of Obama-themed messages has surprised even security researchers.

Given that the Obama campaign communicated with its supporters through email, people may be less suspicious of emails about the president-elect than ones purporting to link to dirty pictures of Angelina Jolie. Our advice: Think twice before clicking on any links you receive in emails.

-Ben Worthen

Source: blogs.wsj.com