Anti-Obama sentiments used in spam campaign

'DDoS software' turns out to be malware.

In a new spam campaign users are being urged to participate in a DDoS attack on the website of American president Barack Obama in protest against his healthcare reforms.

The email contains a link to a piece of software that users can download to participate in the attack. However, this software turns out to be a piece of malware and users downloading it will not find themselves participating a dubious political protest, but are likely to see their computers join a botnet.

In a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack, a server is bombarded with data originating from a large number of systems, with the goal of knocking it offline. While there have been examples in the past where many users joined forces in a politically driven DDoS attack, users should be aware that participating in one is an illegal activity under most legislations. More importantly, they should be cautious when installing software downloaded from the internet, and never do so from untrusted sources.

More details at Proofpoint here, with comments at The Register here.

21 August 2009

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