Barack Obama’s election as the 44th president of the United States has spawned a new malware attack. Scammers wasted no time sending out e-mails with links to a video of the victory speech he gave the night of the election. The link takes the user to a site called America.gov, and like many malicious spams before it, produces a pop up claiming Adobe Flash must be updated in order for the video to run. The download is, of course, malware which steals personal info and sends it to a host machine run by the scammers.

Another version of the attack claims to come from a Spanish news site and has a video actually embedded in the e-mail. Clicking on it prompts a download called “BarackObama.exe” and if run it sets up a direct link between the PC and the scammers. Experts are particularly worried about this variation as it is not detected by anti-virus software.

Yahoo! has introduced several offerings designed to keep users in the know during this presidential election. The first called the Political Dashboard. The dashboard allows users to read campaign headlines, track polls, and even create their own scenarios.

It includes a red and blue Electoral College map and allows the user’s candidate’s poll performance to be tracked over time. On Election Day their homepage will offer snapshots of each candidate’s current status as each state’s polls close and its winner announced, and simply searching for “Obama” or “McCain” will direct users to shortcuts providing the latest news, online discussions, and poll results. Users can also use their cell phones and Yahoo! Mobile to access election coverage and information.

Technology is usually not mentioned in the hot-button issues in US politics. After foreign policy, the economy and personal jabs, there isn’t much time on camera to talk about what many of us care about most (or at least an awful lot). So, I dug deep into both candidates issue positions and came up with some info you should know before going to the polls.