HICKORY, NC – President Barack Obama is the First U.S. President with a Facebook page, and a YouTube channel. In addition, the President has 1 million “MySpace” friends, 3.7 million Facebook supporters and his campaign database boasts the e-mail addresses of 13 million supporters. President Obama is truly the nation’s first “wired” president.
So is it any surprise that hackers have taken advantage of the new president’s online popularity?
Claremont, NC-based Walling Data, North America’s top distributor of AVG Internet Security Products, discovered a new computer threat this week that exhibits interesting symptoms, including a pop up of the President’s face in the bottom right hand corner of infected computers. Ironically, the worm was discovered on the network of a K-12 school in the President’s home state of Illinois.
“From what we can tell so far, the good news is that this worm is nothing more than a major nuisance. This threat spreads via external devices, such as flash drives, attacking where a network is typically most vulnerable – from the inside” said Luke Walling, President of Walling Data.
“We first discovered the worm in the course of some support work we were providing to the school,” Walling added. “It seems this threat was developed in an off the shelf development environment often used for the production of simple games, the version we have seems to have last been modified in December 2008.”
Walling also noted that the threat is unlikely to be an isolated incident, as it can be easily spread through the use of external devices, like USB flash drives. Schools are especially susceptible because they often allow the use of such devices to move class work back and forth from home and school.
As of today, the worm is not detected by any security product worldwide based on data obtained from virustotal.com and internal testing.
“We have isolated the components of this threat and have provided samples to security vendors to ensure it is properly and quickly detected by popular security products.”
“This is one instance when seeing our President’s face on your computer screen is not a good thing,” joked Walling. “You have to admit, no matter your political affiliation, this proves even hackers have a sense of humor.”
Walling says the work replicates via USB storage devices and network shares and possibly from email.
It appears to be more of a nuisance than a threat to sensitive data, the company says.
On Monday’s only, it will depict President Obama’s face.
The company suggests making sure all PCs are fully Microsoft patched and that firms should forbid the use of outside devices such as USB drives.
Online: www.wallingdata.com
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