It's time to vote, say spammers

Come general elections and the cyber space starts buzzing with election news. So, can cybercrime be far behind? Spams, viruses and thefts are nothing new. The kind of spam mails visible around election times are those encouraging voters to view websites of various electoral candidates, sending party manifestos, requesting for votes and party propaganda mails.

Though in India, not much of election-related cybercrime has been reported, but security and anti-spyware products company Symantec has found out how an Indian, online, non-profit voting website that provides voter services, including voter registration, voter list searching, election information and assembly constituency searching, had become the target of attackers.

“Symantec discovered that this site was compromised and its pages were contaminated with malicious JavaScript. However, at present the website has been cleaned up and is no longer serving the malicious JavaScript,” said Shantanu Ghosh, vice-president, India Product operations, Symantec.

Not only corrupt websites, but spammers may share the credentials of the candidates in the mails or hack political websites to malign candidates or misrepresent information displayed on the website. Amuleek Bijral, country manager-India and Saarc, RSA, the security division of EMC, says that though there would have been an increase in the spam activity, it may not be significantly noticeable as Internet is still not as big a medium in Indian elections as it was in the US during the last presidential elections.

However, these security firms advise online users to be aware of the authenticity of the website they are referring to, for information on political parties and keep their antivirus definitions updated.