Beware Revived Valentine's Day Virus

[Peaches]

Beware Revived Valentine's Day Virus

Gregg Keizer, Computerworld

Saturday, January 31, 2009 4:15 PM PST Spam trumpeting the power of love is nothing more than an old trick dressed up in new clothes, more evidence that the backers of the Waledec bot Trojan are the same bunch that hammered users in 2007 with Storm, security companies are warning.

Multiple security vendors, including MX Logic Inc., Trend Micro Inc., and Panda Security, have issued alerts about new Valentine's Day-themed spam campaigns that try to dupe users into installing the Waledec bot.

Subject lines for the spam, said Sam Masiello , vice president of information security at MX Logic, are "short and sweet," and include "Me and You," "In Your Arms" and "With all my love." From the spam, users who browse to the embedded link reach a site with a dozen hearts, any one of which download an executable file when clicked.

Masiello first noted the campaign last Thursday, but other researchers, including those at Trend Micro and Panda, picked up on the trend Monday. Both Masiello and Florabel Baetiong, an anti-spam research engineer with Trend, noted the similarity between the recent infection attempt and Valentine's Day scams launched last year by hackers controlling Storm, another bot Trojan that has since fallen into disuse, possibly because the crew responsible surrendered to heavy pressure by security experts

Story: http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/arti..._day_virus.html