We all are pretty much excited about the November 6th elections and the presidential campaigns going on. But looks like few people are banking on these for their own benefits. Who else these can be? Cybercriminals and scammers! As the much watched Obama Vs. Romney presidential race is heating up, cybercriminals are trying to tap the opportunity as much as they can, and using the same as a bait to hit malicious sites. A recent study by Trend Micro has revealed that a large number of election-related keywords are sending several hits to malicious sites, out of which some of the data is below:

Keywords No. of Hits
Obama – 26,559
Romney – 4,519
Elections – 806
2012 Elections – 358

All these figures are from the past three months, and it is easy to guess that these are going to multiply soon. But what’s more interesting amid all this chaos is the number of hits for each candidate. When it comes to the number of failed attempts to access a malicious site, Obama gets the users’ vote. And cybercriminals agree: when we checked the number of unique domains blocked since January, there were 4 Obama-related domains for every 1 Romney domain.

Most of the victims of the scammers are people from United States and Canada. Majority of the hits are from disease vector URLs and spam-related, which was consistent with previous election-related threats.

Besides, some malware have also been discovered taking advantage of Presidential elections. These include ADW_MARKETSCORE, Romney V. Obama Tax Policies.pdf, HEUR_PDFEXP.E, SOHANAD worm, WORM_VOBFUS.SMAC, WORM_VOBFUS.RU, WORM_MSIL.BR, and WORM_SILLY.SS.

Of course, this is not uncommon as we always had similar attacks coming our way. Last month, Symantec published a warning on their site about a new malware found wreaking havoc on mobile devices owned by women, specifically those looking for a wealthy partner. Symantec discovered Android.Loozfon, a rare form of malware that has a specific target – females with Android devices. Loolzfon steals data from the compromised device such as contact details stored on the device as well as the phone number of the device. The point of which is, the more contact numbers and e-mail addresses the criminals acquire, the more people they can infect. The data acquired can also be sold to other spammers.

Then of course, we have the instance of London Olympics 2012 that was actively targeted by spammers with messages including anything right from prize and free tickets in exchange for your information, malware disguised as prize notification, or request to contact specific people.