Valentine's Day brings us more viruses and cyber threats than usual
According to a Feb. 13 report in Manila Standard Today, this Valentine's Day will bring us more than flowers and chocolate. It will bring us a greater risk for computer virus and other cyber threats usually using spam (unsolicited junk email) or fake ads.
Spam always increases around a holiday. As we get closer to Valentine's Day, the level of spam is increasing. Fake promotions and unbelievable discounts on dinners, jewelry and other expensive items are major themes for spam around Valentine's Day. Offers for fake e-cards, chocolates and flowers are also bait. The aim of this spam is to capture your personal and financial information.
But it's not just though email that information-stealing spam can be delivered to you. Social Network spam is also a way to capture your personal information. Usually this is done through an ad or other fake application on a site like Facebook.
Symantec monitors spamming methods through its Probe Network. The idea of this Probe Network is to monitor new spamming methods and the new techniques spammers create. This year the top word combinations that the Probe Network says are appearing most frequently in spam messages are:
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Find Your Valentine
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eCards for Valentine
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Valentine's Day Flowers
The eCard spam messages say that someone has sent you an Valentine's Day message and tell you to click a link. That link is not a Valentine's Day message though. It is a malicious attachment that Symantec describes as a Backdoor Trojan. A Backdoor Trojan gives a hacker a way into your computer without your knowledge so he can steal your data.
To protect yourself from these Valentine's Day viruses and cyber threats, the Symantec Official Blog posts these suggestions:
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Do not open unsolicated emails form unknown sources.
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Do not click on any links included in email messages. Instead, type the link in the address bar.
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Do not open attached files that claim to be Valentine's greeting cards, e-cards, etc.
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Buy products from authentic websites that are protected by SSL certificates.
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Install effective antivirus and antispam solution software.
Symantec is monitoring the current Valentine's Day spam attacks and will keep Symantec software users updated.
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