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Presidential Election (spam) Campaign

09.12.2008 - 3:30 PM
Spammers are taking note of the US elections and are now taking advantage. We are seeing different types of spam being sent out using subjects looking like headlines and including the names of each of the presidential candidates. The spam seen so far has been casino spam or malicious spam including this campaign of messages. 

The casino spam contains variations in HTML code to try and sneak past email filters, and a link to accounts hosted on spaces.live.com. The page hosted on spaces.live.com then has a link to click on to get to the actual casino site. Spam hosted on Web 2.0 sites such as this is a direct result of Captcha breaking services. 

Screenshot of spam using Obama's name: 

Screenshot of page hosted on spaces.live.com: 

The malicious spam is interesting because the group responsible for it is the same group which has been sending out malicious celebrity spam. They are using pages on hijacked domains that try to entice you to install a missing codec. They seem to have moved on from the Angelinas and Britneys to the current news of the US elections in order to lure victims.

Screenshot of malicious spam: 

Screenshot of fake codec page: 

Security Researcher: Chris Astacio 

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