Will You Be My Valentine And Help Me Sell Viagra?

February 14th, 2007 Davis Posted in Technology, Spam |

Frankly after all of the noise surrounding the original I Love You virus, I’m surprised that we haven’t seen more of this con, but it looks like someone has decided to take advantage of the Valentine’s day spirit, in order to release a nasty worm onto the internet. The subject lines in the email looks innocent enough, but when you open it blammo!, it installs a backdoor program that will turn your computer into a lean mean zombie spamming machine.

While I think it’s pretty terrible that someone would release something that is going to cause so much trouble, I will say that the social engineering on the these holiday viruses is a lot smarter then many of the threats we see. Here you are minding your own business when all of a sudden you get an email from an old flame or someone already in your existing social network. Of course you’re going to be curious as to what it says, but by looking at it, you’ve now just sent it to all of the people in your address book and they are the next to be tempted by the bait. Given the number of email addresses that most people store in their address book, even if they got a minimal response rate, this thing was destined to take off pretty fast. Hopefully, the experts will have this contained pretty quickly, but in the meantime it’s much better to stick with physical Valentines anyway, they mean a lot more and don’t send emails to your ex-girlfriends.