[Air-l] Dirty E-Politics: When will virus writers get righteous?

[Ellis Godard]

Okay, so, spam, spoofs, phishing? Bboring. So you make a few
bucks, maybe get caught. Whoopee. Trojans and worms that
sucker the suckerable into doing things no one should do, for
no one's benefit in particular except the cheap thrills of the
virus writer? Yawn. Old news; been happening since '93.

But send an email that looks like it's from the ACLU, that
announces a time-critical action needed (thereby baits the
faithful into clicking immediately because it isn't about
their credit card info or some Nigerian attorney) and asks
folks to click an embedded link that launches a nasty *.exe or
*.bat file, THEN you're really accomplishing something new,
and messy. 

Targeted viral mail that selectively wipes out Democratic
harddrives, or that critically impairs the PCs of Republican
activists? The day before an election, or the day before the
other "side" has something *real* that will happen or be
deployed or be announced?

An email they might even forward madly before investigating
thoroughly? Or something that includes an address book worm so
that one activist easily infects tons of others, in a snowball
process, instead of these dumb "I just grabbed a few random
sentences from some random file on your computer, that don’t
make sense on their own and out of context" worm messages?

How has this not happened yet - or has it, and I've missed it?

-eg