Scam Email Trojan Alert – Another Obama Sex Tape

Some time ago, on this site, I wrote “Now that Barack Obama has been officially nominated to carry the Democrats banner into the upcoming U.S. presidential election, be prepared for a deluge of spam scams perpetrated by cyber-criminals based on his popularity on the one hand, and our need to be titillated on the other hand, to leverage their malicious activities”.

One such spam email campaign is already in operation which provides a link purportedly leading to a video of Barack Obama disclosing his transsexual affairs. I know, you’re asking yourself – who could possibly believe this kind of nonsense?

The simple answer is this – cyber-criminals know that by sending out countless millions of this type of email, enough people will respond, by clicking on the embedded link, that it will produce millions of dollars in easy pickings.

So not surprisingly, today we have reports of another Obama sex tape email scam. Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, a well known developer and vendor of security software and hardware, reports on his Blog of another scam email that includes the wording “United States Senator for Illinois Barack Obama in 2007 was travel to Ukraine and have sex action with many ukrainian girls!” (sic)

According to Sophos, clicking on the enclosed link to view the video, will lead to the downloading and installation of the Mal/Hupig-D Trojan horse onto your computer.

As always, emails claiming that US presidential candidate Barack Obama was involved in a sex scandal, should be automatically treated as a threat against your computer.

Follow the tips below to protect yourself against these and other threats.

Don’t open emails that come from untrusted sources.

Don’t run files that you receive via email without making sure of their origin.

Don’t click links in emails. If they come from a known source, type them on the browser’s address bar. If they come from an untrusted source, simply ignore them, as they could take you to a web designed to download malware onto your computer.

Keep your computer protected. Install a security solution and keep it up-to-date.