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Obama Worm Harmless and Likely a Student Prank

by Kaiser Hwang on February 2, 2009 at 07:42 AM

If President Obama's face appears in the lower-right corner of your screen, you may be infected with what's called the "Obama worm." Likely a variant of the MAL_OTORUN code that spreads via USB drives and network shares, this worm is essentially harmless -- except for the fact that Obama's mug appears on your screen every Monday.

Jamz Yaneza, a senior threat analyst and researcher at Trend Micro, says "it is probably some prank by a student since today's 'serious' malware, as you may have noticed, would have at least installed a keylogger to steal some information." Further supporting this idea of a student prank, Thompson Cyber Security Labs has a blog post specifying that the worm's victim was a school with about 100 PCs -- the computers had file sharing enabled, and the worm appeared on all of the PCs at about the same time.

Then again, given Obama's attraction to tech, perhaps this is just his way of letting you know he's always thinking about you. [From: CNET]

Tags: barack obama, BarackObama, malware, pranks, safety, security

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