President-elect Barack Obama is already targeted as the subject of a malicious malware campaign designed to steal information from infected computers. Following Obama"s presidential victory Tuesday, malware authors were quick to create a Trojan exploiting the high volumes of Web traffic surrounding Obama, security experts said.
And so far, researchers say that spam capitalizing on Obama"s victory has experienced a sharp upward spike, comprising about 60 percent of all spam messages in what has become a globalized attack. "The hackers are taking advantage of Obama-mania," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for SophosLabs. "So many people have been excited or interested in (the election), that they might be susceptible to it."