At this time of year it is no surprise to learn that certain nefarious individuals are attempting to take advantage of Valentine’s Day in order to compromise as many computer systems as they can.
If you haven’t got a good spam filter then emails with subject lines such as ‘Falling in love with you’, ‘I belong to you’, and ‘I love being in love with you’ may have started creeping into your inbox.
The messages simply contain one line romantic comments such as ‘Me and You’ or ‘With all my love’, in addition to a link.
Said link will direct the recipient to a web page that displays a number of images of hearts along with a message to click on one of them.
Unsurprisingly, all of the hearts lead to the same conclusion – a malicious program called ‘love.exe’ or ‘you.exe’ will be downloaded, turning the infected machine into a zombie which is added to a botnet that is also believed to be behind the Barack Obama hoax sent last year.
This new botnet is sending out an estimated 11 million messages per day, meaning that it will likely rival confiker as one of the most prevalent security issues of the year.
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use webmail (fastmail etc)
if you use email program (tbird, pegasus, etc), then read as plain text. that text-mode also ignores the tracking/bug-images.
Thats good advice. Thanks 123.