The Channel Wire

November 04, 2008

In the final hours of the 2008 election, Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama is the favored presidential candidate for spammers, who have overwhelmingly capitalized on his name in order to solicit merchandise and distribute malware.

The spammers' presidential pick was detected by researchers at MessageLabs after intercepting and doing analysis on election-related spam in the past 24 hours.

The findings? Researchers found that of all the detected spam mentioning the election or the candidates, Obama's name appeared in 95 percent of the spam subject lines, while Republican presidential candidate John McCain appeared in only 5 percent.

However, despite the catchy subjects, don't anticipate any heartfelt political messages. While many spam messages appear to focus on the election or the presidential candidates, the majority simply capture the user's interest with an election-focused subject line. When the user opens the e-mail, the message generally attempts to sell typical spam merchandise or lead them to another Web site.

"They tend to be a standard spam attack," said Matt Sergeant, senior antispam technologist for MessageLabs. "The subject lines vary in completely crazy ways. But they're almost all trying to sell some kind of product at the end of those links. They're not trying to sell anything political."

Perhaps surprisingly, results of MessageLabs' spam analysis are not reflective of current impending U.S. voting trends, which, according to many polls, indicate the race between the two candidates is much more closely aligned. However, MessageLabs researchers say that the skew toward Obama—whether favorable or unfavorable—could reflect the fact that many spammers are based overseas, where the race is disproportionately in favor of an Obama win.

"A lot of spam is sent by spammers abroad," Sergeant said. "And certainly abroad the political balance is much more in favor of an Obama presidency than a McCain presidency."

"That may be a related factor, but it's impossible to tell," he added.

Sergeant said that the copious amounts of election spam will likely die down in the weeks that follow Nov. 4.

"There's going to be a lot of news about this for the coming couple of weeks. The spammers will just capitalize on that," he said.

Some of the spam subject lines have included:

-- Obamamercial

-- Obama Six Pack

-- Mr. Obama Would Have Voted For Genocide

-- Three Stocks Set To Soar With An Obama Victory in 2008

-- 650 Latinos Killed In USA! Shocking Video = Obama's Plan

-- DEFEAT OBAMA by Forwarding This Email

-- BELLA Actor Exposes Obama: Video Is Shocking Viewers!

-- Profiles In Courage? A Challenge To Obama & McCain By Former Congressman Mark Siljander/OP-ED

-- BREAKING DOWN THE INFOMERCIAL: Did Presidential Candidate Barack Obama Get A Return On His Investment?/Interviews

-- 500 Clerics Pray Obama Repents On "Federal Sex Policies"

-- Will Obama Win? Get a Presidential T-shirt + $50 gift card