Huge Political Spam Predicted Before Upcoming Presidential Election

SonicWall, a network infrastructure firm, forecasts that the registered US voters will receive over 5 Billion spam mails carrying a political theme during the 30 days before the November 4, 2008 Presidential Election.

Also, over the last three months starting from July 2008, SonicWall estimated that political spam increased 20%.

Andy Klein, Product Marketing Manager, SonicWall, says that there are chiefly three kinds of spam that are politically oriented. The most commonly observed one include those which use the subject of election as bait to get recipients to view the spam mail, and open its attachment or URL. This type of political spam accounted for nearly 90% of all political messages, as reported by TechRadar on October 3, 2008.

The second type of political-oriented spam, which makes up approximately 7% of all political spam, is advocacy spam in which a group/person distributes spam to influence voters. Since political e-mails need not to comply with the Can-Spam Act, John McCain and Barack Obama, the two presidential candidates, are at liberty to spam any amount.

Finally, the third kind of political spam comprises phishing scams and it accounts for 3% of all messages. In this category, an election ruse is used to gather user's financial or other personal information.

Furthermore, although bank failures and other economy related topics have been increasingly used in spam messages during the end week of September 2008, SonicWall's predictions will continue to be valid. spammers are already taking advantage of the current hot news by combining both the political subjects, "Who is better for the economy, Obama or McCain?" SonicWall predicts that the political spam will comprise 1-2% of total spam by November 4, 2008, the day of the election.

Moreover, according to Klein, spammers will surely exploit the widespread excitement gripping the approaching election. Therefore, both consumers and businesses need to adopt protective measures against increasing deluge of spam.

However, security experts state that the predicted 5 Billion spams, rather a conservative figure, is far greater than the 1.25 Billion spam mails that marked the 2004 presidential election.

Related article: Hack.Huigezi Virus Attacks China PCs Rapidly

» SPAMfighter News - 10/13/2008