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Don't Get Flashed This Valentine's Day
David Utter
Staff Writer
2007-02-14
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
Greeting cards arriving in inboxes may be more than just humble messengers of love; they could be the gateway to a painful infection for your computer.
No one wants to deal with a virus that comes as a results of some ill-advised contact. It could happen if people are a little too quick to open a certain spam email that hits on the holiday.
Dmitri Alperovitch, research scientist at Secure Computing, said his firm saw the first example of a new attack related to Valentine's Day this year. A phony greeting card provides a link to a fake Flash Player.
Clicking on that brings in a Trojan that permits the takeover of the victim's machine. Congratulations, you're the proud owner of another zombied bot on the Internet. It didn't have to be that way.
Alperovitch said phishers and virus distributors take advantage of people's greater expectations to receive greeting cards and related items in their inboxes around the holidays. There is a higher chance for such disguised messages to be opened.
The for-profit business of phishing and spam mean that law enforcement has to improve to put an end to such schemes. That's going to be difficult.
Alperovitch said that in some cases, phishing scams net $20,000 to $100,000 per month. There are places where that kind of business is a lot of money, and he said it can buy favors and influence and payoff judges and prosecutors.
It's going to be a long time before spamming gets relegated to a footnote in the history of the Internet.
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Tags: Phishing, Spam, Crime, Valentine's Day
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About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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