Super Tuesday malware attack targets US voters

A customer submitted an interesting file to SophosLabs yesterday, and asked us to take a look at it.

Its name was

Super_Tuesday_2012_voting_information.exe

“Super Tuesday”, as American readers are probably all too aware, is the day when the largest number of American states vote to choose which candidate will run for the job of president in 2012. Barack Obama isn’t facing any opponents in the Democrat party, so all the voting is for Republicans this year.

We don’t know whether the customer who forwarded us the suspect file was specifically targeted, or whether they were caught in a more widely spammed-out campaign, but if they had made the mistake of opening the file they would have put their Windows computers at risk.

The Trojan horse communicates with a Russian website and has the ability to download further malware. In…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

Graham Cluley is a veteran of the cybersecurity industry, having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of cybersecurity, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, or drop him an email.