Obama Worm Spreads With Image Of President's Face

It's no secret that President Barack Obama is the nation's most wired president.

So now it's no surprise that his face pops up everywhere. Literally. Security experts at Walling Data, a distributor for security company AVG, detected a new Internet worm this week that, among other things, emerges with a pop-up image of the president's face in the bottom right-hand corner of infected computers. On Mondays only. Go figure.

Some would say that it's no surprise. President Obama is the only president to have a Facebook page and a YouTube channel, and touts 1 million MySpace friends, 3.7 million Facebook members and has 13 million supporters listed on his campaign database.

Face it, Obama's Internet acumen no doubt was integral in his ability to rally the masses and secure the presidency. So why not his own Internet worm?

So far, the worm appears to be a prank and does not seem to have malicious intent, experts say.

"From what we can tell so far, the good news is that this worm is nothing more than a major nuisance. This threat spread via external devices, such as flash drives, attacking where a network is typically most vulnerable -- from the inside," said Luke Walling, president of security company Walling Data, in a statement.

Walling said that the threat was developed in an environment often used for the production of simple games, with its latest modification in December 2008.

Like the recent Conficker worm that wreaked havoc on users' PCs earlier in January, the Obama worm is expected to spread rapidly on USB flash drives across networks.

The threat first appeared in a grade school's computer network in Obama's home state of Illinois, originating from either USB flash drives or via e-mail.

And experts note that the Obama worm likely won't be an isolated incident, due to the rapid self-replicating nature of the virus. Schools are especially susceptible due to the fact that they allow use of USB drives but have limited security infrastructure and control over the transmission of information.

However, this worm exploits vulnerabilities on unpatched PCs lacking security updates, and as of Thursday has not been detected by any security product. As always, users are advised to keep their Microsoft operating systems current with the latest security updates.