The Hillary Clinton election campaign is being exploited in a spam message that tries to trick users into downloading a Trojan to their desktops by pretending to offer a link to a video of a Hillary Clinton campaign speech. "It's the first time we've seen spam like this targeting Hillary Clinton," says Doug Bowers, Symantec's senior director of anti-abuse engineering, who says the spam message, still not seen in large volumes, was first spotted today. (Compare Messaging Security products)

The spam, which has the subject line "Hillary Clinton Video!!" offers users a link promising a video of the presidential candidate giving a speech. In reality, clicking on it would cause a Trojan to be downloaded to compromise the victim's machine for the purpose of sending more spam.

The U.S. presidential campaign is in full swing, but other than Hillary Clinton, the only other candidate's name being abused for malware purposes in this way is Ron Paul, according to Symantec. So far, neither Barack Obama nor John McCain, viewed as party frontrunners, have had their names exploited for malware.

Symantec describes how the bogus "Hillary Clinton video" spam works in its blog, which can be found here.