Spammers and Hackers Get Political
Chris Barton at McAfee Avert Blogs noted two days ago about a slew of Ron Paul spam hitting his inbox. The republican presidential hopeful appears to be the benefactor of a botnet-powered spam campaign according to researchers at the University of Alabama. Wired is reporting the research group behind the Spam Data Mining for Law Enforcement Applications project reached this conclusion after analyzing data they collected.
This is clearly a criminal act in support of a campaign, which has been committed with or without their knowledge," says Gary Warner, the University of Alabama's director of research in computer forensics. "The question is, will we see more and more of this, or will this bring shame to the campaigns and will they make clear that this is not a form of acceptable behavior by their supporters?" Warner pointed to provisions of the federal Can-Spam Act.Ron Paul spokesman Jesse Benton says the campaign has no knowledge of the scam.
I don't know much about Ron Paul but he seems like a decent and intelligent guy who can keep up with Jon Stewart (yes it seems my television sources for political news have been reduced to The Daily Show and C-SPAN), so I don't think anyone would seriously think the candidate is behind this. This is just an example of unscrupulous supports going too far.
Chris Barton also commented on the contents of the spam but also some of the foul play we'll likely see over the next year:
This is trivial stuff as I’m sure you can appreciate, but that tinyurl did catch my attention:tinyurl 345s6g -redirects-> 301 Moved Permanently -to-> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeHWW5gbc0w
“This video has been removed due to terms of use violation.”
Now I have no idea what that video was (and frankly dear, I don’t give a damn!) but what struck me is that this would be a really efficient way to remove your competitions videos from youtube. I’m not picking on YouTube here, I believe almost any social site would do the same.
In addition to spam, we will probably hear about denial of service attacks and YouTube vandalism.
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