Romney wins Most Mentioned Politician status in spam

SYDNEY & AUCKLAND – February 10, 2012 – Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor who’s leading polls in the race to become the Republican Party’s nominee for the US presidency, is also the favourite politician of spammers touting knockoff drugs and dubious bargains in junk email.

Romney is mentioned in 45 per cent of spam messages that reference US politics, ahead of second-placed Republican Newt Gingrich, who scored 33 per cent, according to a Bitdefender analysis of 8 million unsolicited messages spread in January.

Romney’s name was most often used in scam messages that advertise low-interest loans or free credit score analysis while Gingrich was mentioned in junk mail promoting miraculous energy saving devices that almost certainly don’t exist. Most of these offerings actually redirect the unwary user to survey site scams or knockoff drugs for sexual dysfunctions.

US Republican hopeful Ron Paul came third in the spammers’ list, with 12.18 per cent. The most popular politician outside the Republican race that caught the spammers’ attention this year was Bill Clinton, with 3.99 per cent.

“Winning Most-Mentioned Politician in Bitdefender’s spam survey is probably not an honour that many politicians want,” said Bitdefender E-Threats Analyst Bogdan Botezatu, who coordinated the spam study. “And I don’t think we’ll see spammers suddenly turning into political pundits. But the results could tell us which politicians spammers think are most likely to get a reaction from random email readers. Spammers are, ultimately, after money and they’re essentially making a bet on popularity when they favour one politician’s name over another.”

Spam messages frequently use names of celebrities or politicians in fragments of news items in an attempt to give credibility to the message and to trick antispam filters that look for the percentage of links versus other words in the message. Only a small portion of the spam analysed in the Bitdefender study – or about 0.24 per cent – mentioned US politicians at all.

In the overall analysis of spam – not filtered to include only political references – the Republican politicians were handily beat by celebrities including Jay Leno, Eva Longoria, Kobe Bryant, and even political commentator Rush Limbaugh.

For more information on Bitdefender’s spam survey, see http://www.malwarecity.com.