As Election Day inches closer and closer to the United States, researchers have been detecting a stark increase in malicious campaigns, seeking to capitalize on this highly combative presidential race.
Researchers have been warning of spammers flooding people with election-themed emails, some even delivering ransomware to the user’s computer. Experts have even been discussing botnets influencing this elections social media coverage as well as newly found methods for hacking the US voting systems.
On Wednesday Symantec released a statement claiming they’ve blocked over 8 million spam emails containing election-themed content, subject lines, and attachments from mid-September to mid-October.
While some spam didn’t actually concern the election, others simply used the topic in hopes to higher their chances of being opened.
Even more alarming, researchers at Zscaler reported that there’s a Spanish language election based spam campaign floating around that employs ransomware to encrypt victim’s local, removable and network mapped drives. The subject line of this campaign indicates that the election results are inside, tricking victims into clicking a malicious file.