Cybercrime Goes After Political Donors
It's not surprising to see that cybercriminals are setting up fake campaign sites to scam would-be campaign donors. Findings from WebRoot, reported in ComputerWorld, show a growing problem with political scams:
"What we are seeing is a real explosion in these kinds of sites this year," Watkins said, noting that the 2008 election run-up is the first in which presidential hopefuls have embraced the Web in such a major way.A substantial portion of the hundreds of millions of dollars that candidates are expected to raise this year is likely to be gathered via the Internet and criminals want to be in on that action. "Crooks and criminals always follow the money," Watkins said.
Some of the problem lies with the campaigns themselves.
For example, most of the candidates have not registered domains that are similar to their primary domain name leaving scammers the option of using look-a-like site names. This should be less of a problem in the next presidential election cycle when campaigns and donors are used to seeing and expecting the green bar display that comes along with using extended validation (EV) certificates. At this point I don't think too many browser users would expect to see the green bar and it's lack wouldn't dissuade too many from donating.
The latest version IE and Opera support the EV standard, the next major release of Firefox will support it too. (In the mean time Verisign has a plug-in for Firefox that works with Verisign, Thawte, and GeoTrust certificates).
For more on EV certificates, see the free e-book The Shortcut Guide to Extended Validation SSL Certificates published by Realtimepublishers. The first chapter is available with the other chapters coming soon.
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