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Valentine’s Spam Hearts Your Inbox
SecurityProNews
Staff Writer
2009-02-12
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Valentine's Day spammers have a serious crush on your inbox this year. Since the beginning of February, the proportion of Valentine's related spam has increased from two percent to nine percent, perhaps the largest volume ever seen, according to MessageLabs.
 | | Valentine's Spam Hearts Your Inbox |  |
All of those emails-seven billion daily in one case-are coming from the usual botnet suspects. Most (6.5 percent) has been traced back to the Cutwail botnet, though Xarvester pumps out two percent of all spam. Mega-D, the most active botnet, appears to be skipping Valentine's Day this year.
Cutwail's approach is simple, with subject lines reading "St. Valentine's Bonus" or "Make this Valentine's Day the most memorable ever. Messages in the body link to China-based .cn website hocking products one might expect via email around this holiday-a particular method of increasing one's. . .confidence.
Themed emails like these were ruled last year by the Storm botnet, and that approach is mirrored with links to sites offering herbal…confidence…and by Storm's successor Waledac, which also links to Waledac malware.
"With one in every fifteen spam emails being a Valentine's message from Cutwail, this botnet loves this romantic time of year," said Paul Wood, MessageLabs Intelligence Analyst, Symantec. "Dedicating approximately ninety percent of its output to Valentine-related spam, Cutwail is generating an estimated seven billion spam emails each day. This is possibly the largest volume of Valentine's Day spam even seen."
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SecurityProNews is a daily online and email publication focusing on internet security issues.
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