Waledec, said Stewart, shows all the signs of having been written by the same group, if not the same person, that crafted Storm. "It's so similar that it's unlikely that it's a different group," he said last week, citing the similarity of the messages that start the attacks, as well as the malware's coding.

The Waledec bot first began infecting systems , and used phony holiday greetings and e-cards -- a tactic also employed by Storm during 2008 -- as bait.

"As is often the case with these new outbreaks, [antivirus] detection is scarce so be aware of this new tactic," Masiello said in an entry to the MX Logic security blog Friday evening. The Englewood, Colo.-based company was tracking approximately 4,000 fake Obama e-mails per hour on Saturday.

Obama is scheduled to take the oath of office as the 44th U.S. president on Tuesday in Washington D.C. is that the planned live-streaming of the event will tax the Internet's capabilities. Experts, however, have said that they expect no widespread outages as users watch the inauguration on sites such as CNN.com.