Enterprising malware and trojan distributors have targeted the campaign website of Barack Obama.
The system, commonly seen on social networking sites involves setting up a blog/ profile and including what appears to be a YouTube embed. When users click on the embed, instead of playing a video, it takes the users to another site, where they are prompted to download a trojan or malware.
Computerworld and Websense both have details on the scam, although inaccurately claim it is the work of hackers. It’s not the work of hackers though, because no hacking was done, the accounts were set up legitimately, be it possibly through an automated program, but with approval from the site owner (usually given automatically). These tricks are closer to spamming than hacking, and while the threat is real, is unlikely to affect many users either; that would presume large traffic to these sub-pages, and while some of these campaigns target high volume search traffic, most simply don’t. It does highlight issues though in leaving an open door to new user registrations without an ongoing spam prevention program.
