President Donald Trump and Senator Bernie Sanders are the stars of both spam emails and misleading web domains in a politically-themed malware trap set by cybercriminals.

Researchers at security firm Proofpoint (via ThreatPost) tracked which 2020 political candidate brands were most used by malicious actors this year. The results revealed a clear correlation between each candidate's name recognition and the amount of suspicious clickbait associated with that candidate's name.

Researchers have been monitoring the volume of politically-themed Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE), or fraudulent unsolicited email from dubious sources, since 2016. They began to explore the connection to brand popularity, but what they saw during the 2020 pre-election season highlights a clear choice by cybercriminals to lure their victims with the big guns of the election season.

Trump was the most used target for UCEs in January-February 2020. In political UCEs, Trump's portrait was used 68% of the time. Bernie Sanders' name followed at 8%.

In its report, Proofpoint does not reveal what damage UCE does. The company calls UCEs simply lures, but it is reasonable to assume that they are messages that set up phishing and malware traps in which unlucky users provide personal information or install hostile software.

The company also provided data on suspicious web domain registrations tied to the names of presidential candidates: fraudulent sites with "Trump" in the URL accounted for about half of all domains analyzed; similar to UCE, "Sanders" followed Trump, accounting for about one-third. one-third of the total.

Again, it is unclear what kind of damage these shady sites can cause, but it is certainly not pretty. Cybercriminals tend to know exactly what current events make for good clickbait, and there is no reason not to exploit that for personal gain.

If your inbox is littered with political candidate spam, it is best to block the sender and trash the message. You can usually tell if an email is fake by the sender's address. Look for informality, such as typos or strange letter combinations.

If you still can't tell, don't click on it. Any information you need about a candidate's policies or the latest news can be found on that candidate's verified campaign website or social media.