Beware of love bug, this Valentine. Be it your mailbox or mobile, you could be bitten. As the Valentine Day draws near, more spammers are on their 'love-job.' According to an Trend Micro analysis, 24 percent of the manually-detected malicious Websites during Valentine season contain the string love, besides other references. However, nearly 25 percent of the spam originates from the United States.
It has been observed that e-mail messages, this Valentine's Day season, are typical than previous Storm spam runs. These e-mails include a Web link that redirects users to a site with 12 heart images, and a message 'Guess which one is for you'. When any of the heart images is clicked, the user is prompted to download a malicious file.
Trend Micro, an Internet content security company, has found a rise in spam with Valentine's Day as a theme in creating malicious codes. "Love as a social engineering technique is most popular in the spamming operations of the botnet giant; Storm Known for taking advantage of every occasion, Storm sends e-cards on Christmas, New Year e-cards on or before every first of January, and love e-cards during the Valentine's season," said Amit Nath, country manager, India and SAARC at Trend Micro.
The company, in an analysis, found that spammed messages that pose as 'an invoice from iTunes' in the e-mail's subject line contain an advertisement for a 'special Valentine's Day sale' with links that leads to a fake Canadian Website. "iTunes garnered an estimated amount of around $3 billion in sales for 2008, and the numbers for early 2009 are quite promising as well," he said.
However, he observes that most of the spammers use variations of love and sex in the e-mail messages, while others are classically romantic. In addition, Valentine's Day run include messages with poems by Robert Frost. "As we advance towards mobile internet, spammers too are not far behind. We have analyzed a mobile phone malware that spreads through Bluetooth and Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS)," said Nath.
