USA '08 Barack Obama is ahead not only in the polls but where it counts the most - in spam messages. However, his presidential rival John McCain can claim his own guaranteed enlarged small victory.

The Democrat candidate is the topic of 70 per cent more junk mail messages than his Republican counterpart overall. But McCain edges ahead by a ratio of five to four in one important category - pharmacy spam, according to stats from Secure Computing.

Generally the news hooks used by spammers parallel those of VXers, but relatively little election-themed malware has emerged this election season. A campaign that punted malware in the guise of supposedly compromising images of Obama getting jiggy with a young Ukrainian strumpet was the one exception that proved the rule. The malware attempted to spread the Hupig-D Trojan, as explained in a blog posting by Sophos here. ®

Related stories

• Penis pill spam: The hard figures (25 September 2009)
• Updated Spammers swift to exploit Jackson death to punt malware (26 June 2009)
• 'Obama quits' spam recruits zombie drones (19 January 2009)
• Net pharmacies raided in nine countries (13 November 2008)
• McCain 'dead' email ruse punts penis pills (6 November 2008)
• Report: Obama, McCain campaigns hit with 'sophisticated' cyberattack (5 November 2008)
• Jonathan Schwartz scrambles aboard the Obama train (5 November 2008)
• USA '08 Morning voting in America (4 November 2008)
• USA '08 The US election, live online from er... London (4 November 2008)
• USA '08 The True Confessions of an Election Official (4 November 2008)
• USA '08 Sarah Palin gets righteously punk'd (3 November 2008)
• USA '08 Rigged e-voting machine snacks on Homer Simpson (30 October 2008)
• Martin Sheen backs Paris for president (9 October 2008)
• Obama strumpet-sex scandal ruse spreads malware (9 September 2008)