Tech News

Love bug is here again

Perhaps targeting the romantic side of computer users, spammers have gone full steam on Valentine's Day. Trend Micro has found a rise in spam campaigns using Valentine's Day as a theme in creating malicious codes. Whether this is attributable to the romantic nature of humanity in general or to love's overwhelming effect on everyone, the spammers are taking advantage of this and leave love messages, or traces of it in their codes.

Love as a social engineering technique is most popular in the spamming operations of the botnet giant Storm. Known for taking advantage of every occasion and holiday known to man, Storm sends Christmas ecards on Christmas, New Year ecards on or before every first of January, and love ecards during the Valentine's season. The intent is to convert more zombie PCs for the bot, which would then be used for future cybercriminal activities - spamming, scamming, information theft, DDOS attacks. The first Storm malware to send love greetings was WORM_NUWAR.CQ, which was earlier used to send messages about nuclear wars. In 2007, WORM_NUWAR.CQ made a 180-degree turn from its family's signature technique by replacing war with love during the Valentine's Day season. Explained Amit Nath, Country Manager-India & SAARC, Trend Micro, "In 'Storm technique' of spam, once infected, the computer becomes part of the ever-growing Waledac botnet which makes it vulnerable to being abused for stealing private data."

Trend Micro recently observed e-mail messages flooding inboxes weeks before Valentine's Day, also typical of previous Storm spam runs. These e-mails include a weblick, which on clicking redirect users to a site with 12 heart images, and a message, "Guess which one is for you". When any of the hearts on this page is clicked, the user is prompted to download a file, malicious of course, detected by Trend Micro as WORM_WALEDAC.AR.