Valentine is not only a day with red roses and delicious chocolate. Valentine’s Day is today also a day for spammers and virus programmers.
Saturday, 14 February is Valentine’s Day – an American holiday which has found its way to Europe. It is not only a day with red roses and delicious Belgian chocolate which is being sent around, but also love messages on the internet. A new examination performed by Microsoft shows that Danes are one of the most flirtatious people online in Europe. More than two thirds of Danish users flirt with another person online.
Valentine’s Day is also a great time for spammers and virus programmers, as people tend to send more greetings to each other and it is difficult to know the “good” greetings from the dangerous.
This year it is particularly botnets, which accounts for a large proportion of spam volume, and much is directed specifically against Valentine’s day. Ttells Comendo security.
One of the major botnet, Donbot, which is believed to have control of over 800,000 computers, sends mails with subject lines such as “someone thinks you are very special and has sent you a kiss” Waledec uses subject lines such as “you have received a Valentine E-card” and “a Valentine card from a friend” and Pushdo spammers are using simple lines as “prepare for Valentine’s Day ‘and’ be ready”.
But be prepared to subject lines like ‘hey! 14 Feb ‘,’ hey! February, the month of love ‘and’ hi 14 hearts.
Waledec botnet is believed to be built on the remnants of the infamous Storm botnet, but has not yet reached the same size. It must be Valentine’s help to change. In the United States the spam related to Valentine’s Day represent 2-4 per cent of the entire spam, and in Denmark it is 4 per cent.
Comendo recommends you to be suspicious of everything you receive – whether it is e-mail, messenger or SMS messages. Find out who sent it and ask the person whether it really is something he / she has sent. Be careful with unknown links. You could copy the address and paste it into Google instead of clicking directly on the link.