Security experts have warned that hackers are using President-elect Barack Obama's White House victory to help spread a new Trojan horse designed to steal passwords and other personal information. Cybercriminals have several different tactics they are using to help harvest personal information that can lead to identity theft.

One such method is to send out e-mails with a link to his victory speech, but rather than have the Adobe Flash video and necessary plug-ins, it's actually a malware executable file.  Other internet users have been receiving e-mails that have attached .exe files that have been downloaded to harvest personal information.

Because the internet has become a powerful campaign tool used by both President-elect Obama and Sen. John McCain, people let their guards down and clicked on links in e-mails they thought were from the candidate's campaign.

"The hackers are taking advantage of Obama-mania," said Graham Cluley, Sophos Labs senior technology consultant.

Although the attacks have originated from several different locations across the world, it seems that Eastern Europe, including Ukraine, is one of the hotbeds for the Obama-themed malware.  Even though more people will learn about the malware threat, security experts warn the Obama-themed malware will continue to spread in the next few months.

Security maker SophosLabs has published examples of several different types of malware spam attacks it has come across since Tuesday.

For example, the malware SophosLabs has encountered has a rootkit to better conceal itself, a backdoor, password searcher, and can monitor both keyboard strokes and mouse inputs, while also taking screenshots.

"My guess is that this is far from the last example we will see of Barack Obama's name and image being abused by malware authors in their greed to infect Internet users," the blog on the SophosLab web site says.