First the Campaign Ads, Then the Phishing...

It's bad enough that most of us have to deal with the daily flood of scam e-mails trying to steal our precious personal and financial data. But with next year's crop of presidential candidates now raising millions of dollars online, can it really be long before we begin to see phishers and other Internet con artists trying to siphon off some of that political money?

That was the very question posed by Chris Soghoian, a grad student at Indiana University's School of Informatics. Soghoian, probably best known for his online airline boarding pass generator that briefly landed him in hot water with the FBI, warned about the potential for political phishing at the eCrime Researchers Summit held today at Carnegie Mellon University.

While fake political fundraising e-mails targeting supporters of one particular candidate are sure to appear, Soghoian says it's probably more likely that we'll see the scam artists blasting out solicitations made to look as though they were sent from the Republican or Democratic parties. That's because unlike phishing e-mails that target customers of a particular bank, a phishing message designed to appeal to members of a particular political party has a better chance of landing in the inbox of someone who actually belongs to the party.

More predictions of doom and gloom from the collision of phishing and politics can be found in Soghoian's slides.

By Brian Krebs |  October 5, 2007; 5:58 PM ET Latest Warnings
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