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Hackers Cash in on Obama Wave, Target Bloggers
Techtree News Staff, Jan 27, 2009 1731 hrs ISTHackers have signed up with http://my.barackobama.com and created blogs with links within the site leading to the Trojan
A week after the Obama administration came to power; cyberspace is still riddled with hackers cashing in on his popularity.
The latest amongst the tactics engineered by these hackers is to lure victims to click on a link that is masked as a legitimate Barack Obama video. The fake YouTube image link eventually leads to an exe file, which when clicked will infect the user's computer with a Trojan. This process usually involves a message stating that a missing codec will be required to view the video. While the Youtube ploy is not something new in the array of tricks used to lure unsuspecting users to click on a malicious link, what makes it different this time is the method of propagation.
The hackers actually signed up with http://my.barackobama.com, a popular online community backing President Obama, and created blogs with links within the site that led to the malicious Trojan. The hackers, in order to ensure maximum click-throughs, posted multiple blog entries from various IDs.
The above site is very popular amongst Obama backers and is currently among the top 1000 most visited websites. If that was not all, there are as many as 9000 websites linking to the website, making propagation of the Trojan a rather quick and easy process. The hackers have used Web 2.0 functionalities to propagate the Trojan; the activities included commenting and posting links in user-generated content.
As of now, Websense Security Labs estimates that the Trojan has a 35% detection rate, so Obama fans, think twice before you click!
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