November 6, 2008

Tuesday's historic acceptance speech by President-Elect Obama is already being used by cyber criminals to commit fraud, according to Gary Warner, the Director of Computer Forensics Research at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). These cyber criminals are using the President-Elect's popularity to perpetuate fraud as others have recently done by using popular media, banking and employment Web sites. Warner's team of Computer Science and Criminal Justice students analyze spam, phishing, and malware as part of their research.

"We've already seen more than 300 copies of this spam e-mail", says Warner, "and we're very concerned that people who missed Tuesday night's speech may follow the link and infect their computer."

The spam points to five separate Web site domains, each registered Tuesday in China. Visiting the Web site requires the user to install an "Adobe Flash Player" in order to watch the speech. The program offered is actually a "keystroke logger." Installing it will cause all user IDs and passwords, whether for online banking, online stores, email, or even chat programs, to be sent to the criminal's computer.

Warner's students have identified the criminal's IP address in the Ukraine, as well as the Chinese domain names, and have shared that data with appropriate authorities. More details are available on Warner's blog, CyberCrime & Doing Time at http://garwarner.blogspot.com/2008/11/computer-virus-masquerades-as-obama.html