The Hindu Business Line : Watch out for Valentine spams

Pune, Feb. 13 Valentine’s Day. People’s thoughts turn to romance and flowers. For the cyber criminal, it is how to lure the unsuspecting user in. They are also taking their efforts to social networks, given their popularity and potential to manipulate the user through ‘friend’ messages.

‘Broken heart’, ‘I am your friend’, ‘Money can’t buy you love’ are some of the Valentine spams which the users have to be looking out for. Broken heart shows images of puppy dogs or 12 pretty hearts and asks “guess which one is for you”. Unfortunately, the Web page is one big image and a single click from a tricked user commences the download of Trojans named “onlyyou.exe” or “youandme.exe” which are not as friendly as they sound. The Trojan can connect to remote Web sites to receive commands and send information about the compromised system.

‘I am your friend’ will unwittingly download a banking Trojan designed to steal log in credentials for banking sites. ‘Money can’t buy you love’ contains a masked redirect to lure victims from legitimate sites to malicious sites.

“In fact, we have seen specially created malicious sites decline as cyber criminals switch to compromising ‘trusted’ Web sites. They are cashing in, literally, on our increased confidence in shopping and researching online - a lot of which happens whilst in the office. As people turn to the Internet to order flowers, chocolates and other gifts – so too are the cyber criminals turning to these sites to compromise them and steal data,” Mr Surendra Singh, Regional Director, SAARC and India, Websense Inc, points out.

Mr Amit Nath, Country Manager, India and SAARC, Trend Micro, also agrees with this view. He said that cyber criminals often use a signature ‘Storm technique’ to cash in on holidays and popular events as a social engineering tool for spamming. Valentine’s Day is no exception.

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