Spammers are taking advantage of public awareness about the U.S. presidential race to trick people into installing malicious software. A recent blast of spam purports to contain links to a video of Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) on the campaign trail, links that in fact lead to software that tries to turn the viewer’s PC into a spam-spewing zombie. The spam campaign, detailed in a brief writeup by researchers at Symantec Corp., encourages recipients to click on a link to download a video interview with Clinton. The link actually fetches a Trojan downloader, which in turn tries to pull down another nasty file that installs a rootkit — a package of tools designed to hide malicious files on the system and prevent their removal. The malicious program also contacts several different Internet servers for instructions to enlist the victim’s PC’s help in future spam campaigns. Symantec detects this threat as Trojan.Srizbi.