Topic: Spammers Favor Obama Over McCain 7 to 1

[Samker]

While political polls may show Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain locked in a close race for the White House, junk e-mail purveyors have a clear favorite.

According to research by Secure Computing, spammers are seven times as likely to invoke Obama's name in a subject line in a bid to trick people into opening the missives.


The company found that spam touting either candidate peaked around the middle of the Republican National Convention. Still, for the month of September, political-themed junk e-mail favored Obama 84 percent of the time, while spam campaigns mentioning McCain made up just 12 percent of the total, Secure Computing said.

The vice presidential race, on the other hand, appears to be far more competitive - at least from the spammer's perspective. Secure Computing found that about 1.9 percent of fake political spam last month named Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin in the headline, while 1.1 percent invoked the name of Sen. Joe Biden.

Spammers frequently tie their junk mail campaigns to current events, and an inflammatory subject line mentioning the political candidates can encourage quite a few people to open the messages. Most often, the content of the message is touting some kind of illegal online pharmacy or is an invitation to download a malicious program disguised as a Web browser plug-in that the message claims is needed to view video content referenced in the e-mail.

Here are a few of the political spam subject lines you may have seen in your inbox recently:

- Obama Ahead Amongst Voters With Similarly Weird Names
- Obama Supporters Attack Hillary in Second Life
- Jesus Endorses Obama; Four Horsemen Opt for McCain

E-mail security firm SonicWall says it expects to see about 5 billion political-themed spam messages between now and Election Day. Still, election-related spam will account for only about 2 percent of the total spam volume the company expects to see before Nov. 4.

(Washington Post)