Virus alerts

From Hackers with Love

New Valentines' malware turning up almost every day

By Vlad Constandes, SEO News Editor

13th of February 2008, 17:36 GMT

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Never trust email, even if they tell you what you'd want to hear. Taking advantage of human ego, which apparently has everybody running circles around it, hackers and cyber criminals have found a new way to convince unsuspecting victims to open and download their infected messages.

In case you see an email telling you that you have a secret admirer,

don't light up and hurry to open it, you're not 16 any more and the person who is so shy to tell you in person won't just attach a picture and a declaration. Instead, do the smart thing and check to see whether you know the person who sent you the email, or if it doesn't look like a bunch of hooey (biq3ygr81b@whatever.com, for example).

Opening emails that have subjects like "Love Rose," "Rockin' Valentine" or "Just You" might prove to be a mistake due to the valentine.exe file included. Greg Day, a security analyst at McAfee, told Web User that "This virus will try to steal the personal information you keep on your PC, try to bring down your security defenses and sign your machine up to an online army." Nobody likes joining the army. The attachment, however, isn't the source of the infection, it only contains some piece of code that will 'persuade' your PC to search for the malware by itself. In case you have ever been faced with the pain of admitting your computer has been infected, you know the agony to have lost every little information you had to give up just to get it clean.

Opening the file will grant cyber criminals with the access to use you PC "to blast out millions of junk emails and to carry out denial of service attacks - by flooding a computer, system or website with so much information that it brings it down," Day said. So, live your love without online thrills and just stay on the safe side.

TAGS:

virus alerts | valentine's day | email | message | mcafee

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