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Symantec gathers malicious code reports from over 120 million client, server, and gateway systems that have deployed its antivirus product, and also maintains one of the world's most comprehensive vulnerability databases, currently consisting of over 25,000 recorded vulnerabilities (spanning more than two decades) affecting more than 55,000 technologies from over 8,000 vendors. The huge boom in Internet campaigning and fund-raising is changing the face of American politics, but it's also creating new opportunities for hackers and con artists. "As election day draws near, Symantec expects to see an increase in phishing attempts, scams and malicious code that exploit election themes and target individual candidates or their campaigns," says a Symantec semiannual Internet threat assessment.
Phishing scams, in which computer users are lured to phony replicas of legitimate Web sites, could mimic campaign home pages to get voters to make what they think are campaign contributions and to provide personal financial information. Expect e-mails pretending to contain campaign information or campaign-related news nuggets that will really contain malicious code, such as Trojan programs that make your computer and its information vulnerable to hackers, and even a potential tool in spreading other attacks.
Hackers may have political goals and axes to grind as well, and they'll find ways to hurt a specific campaign or spread malicious or misleading information about a candidate. In the past, campaign Web sites have seen their home pages shut down by "denial of service" attacks. While such tactics are still available, Symantec warns that more devious, sophisticated and potentially damaging ones could be deployed this year. As pointed out in the first of these two Kiplinger Recommends articles from the Symantec assessment, hackers are shifting their strategies and are now focusing on getting to individual computer users through vulnerabilities in commercial Web sites. Political and campaign Web sites are likely to be attractive targets. "In one possible scenario, these sites might be compromised and potentially made to host malicious code, which in turn could compromise users' computers and result in significant negative media coverage," Symantec warns.
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