Don't fall victim to Valentine malware

(12/02/2010)

Valentine’s Day is coming up and hackers are preparing. This year, hackers will likely concoct a special Valentine potion that uses the promise of being secretly admired combined with our prevailing addiction to sharing personal information on social networks like Facebook. How will it work?

First, hackers easily get a complete list of friends for many users. Then, hackers send to that certain someone a Valentine messages seemingly coming from a friend. Urged to click a Valentine’s Card to retrieve virtual chocolates or roses, you, uh, end up with a virus.

A decade ago, the I LOVE YOU virus spread from one machine to another since few consumers used protection. A decade later, “iloveyou” is the fifth most common password, “lovely” is number 18 and “loveu” is #23 and “loveme” is #43.

Amichai Shulman, CTO of Imperva, says “The success of such a campaign is in numbers. For this, the hacker adds a key ingredient – automation. Using an automated tool, the hacker scrapes friends list from Facebook as well as turns them into a phishing mail, all in a single click of the mouse, to spread their virus.”

Shulman continues “What can you do? First, look up who sent you the Valentine’s greeting and make sure it’s legitimate. Chances are your 5th grade teacher did not and still does not have a crush on you. Chances are your football coach really isn’t into that mushy-mushy stuff. Chances are your neighbor isn’t suddenly into knowing you intimately.”

Amichai requests to lovers to take to heart these recommendations:
· Do not follow links or download software referencing unsolicited spam.
· Update your computer with the latest patches.
· Ensure your anti-virus is enabled and up-to-date.
· If it seems too good to be true, it probably is. Nothing bad will happen if you simply hit ‘delete.’

Malware that uses Valentine's Day as a lure to trick users and infect computers is now a well-established feature of the IT security calendar. Once again, this year it will be no surprise to see numerous emails in circulation with links for downloading romantic greetings cards, or with subjects related to Valentine's Day.

Cyber-crooks, however, are also exploiting other channels, such as Facebook or Twitter, and given the access to millions of users that these social networks provide, they have become just as popular among the criminal fraternity for spreading malware as email.

Social engineering is cyber-crooks’ preferred technique for deceiving users. In these cases it basically involves obtaining confidential information from users by convincing them to take a series of actions. Crimeware and social engineering go hand-in-hand: a carefully selected social engineering ploy convinces users to hand over their data or install a malicious program which captures information and sends it on to the fraudsters.

“The continued use of social engineering by cyber-crooks is a good indication of the infection ratios that this technique for tricking users returns. Otherwise, they would simply have stopped using it”, explains Luis Corrons, Technical Director of PandaLabs.

PandaLabs offers users a series of tips to avoid falling victim to computer threats:

- Don’t open emails or messages received on social networks from unknown senders.

- Do not click any links included in email messages, even though they may come from reliable sources. It is better to type the URL directly in the browser. This rule applies to messages received through any mail client, as well as those in Facebook, Twitter, or other social networks or messaging applications, etc.

- If you do click on any such links, take a close look at the page you arrive at. If you don't recognize it, close your browser.

- Do not run attached files that come from unknown sources. Especially these days, stay on the alert for files that claim to be Saint Valentine’s greeting cards, romantic videos, etc.

- Even if the page seems legitimate, but asks you to download something, you should be suspicious and don't accept the download.

- If, in any event, you download and install any type of executable file and you begin to see unusual messages on your computer, you have probably been infected with malware.

- If you are making any purchases online related to Valentine's Day, type the address of the store in the browser, rather than going through any links that have been sent to you.

- Only buy online from sites that have a solid reputation and offer secure transactions, encrypting all information that is entered in the page. To check that the page is secure, look for the security certificate in the form of a small yellow padlock next to the toolbar or in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen.

- Don’t use shared or public computers for making transactions or operations that require you to enter passwords or other personal details.

- Have an effective security solution installed, capable of detecting both known and new malware strains.

Related topics:  Internet and Web security   Security threats and vulnerabilities 

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