ESET Warns People of Fake Valentines

Security researchers at ESET expect this Valentine's Day to be highly profitable for cyber goons, and hence, they have issued a warning to inform about latest online scams.

According to Urban Schrott, global IT security and cybercrime analyst at ESET, every year, the same approach is followed by cyber criminals, wherein, a spam e-mail requests the user to clock on a link so as to retrieve a Valentine greeting card, as per the news published by TechCentral.ie on February 8, 2010.

On a general note, such links either redirect a user to websites with fake antimalware software or to fraudulent dating websites. The purpose in both the cases is usually same, i.e. to extract money.

Although there are some renowned legal dating websites, these cyber assailants constantly flood the Internet with new bogus ones. The basic elements of such websites are fake profiles of attractive men and women, with the aim to compel users to join or register that website in order to get a chance of meeting them.

To register to these counterfeit websites, membership fee is required, for which credit card numbers are requested. Schrott warned that once the users provide their credit card numbers to the culprits, many unexpected and unusual things take place.

The latest spam e-mails which are hitting Irish inboxes in bulk are titled with subject lines, like, "A lovely girl for you", "Call me on my cell!", or "I want to come to you from Russia". The content of the e-mail is like- "We were talking on the forum, remember me? I am Maria from Russia!" which is followed with a link to click on. Such phrases attract the lonely hearts; however, a high degree of risk is there, as credit cards can be used for illegal international purchases.

ESET also informed about certain malware infected websites which can exploit user's PC: holidays.prosperity66.com/, obscurepop.com/, www.webfetti.com/ etc. Users must avoid visiting them.

ESET recommends users to avoid opening e-mails of unknown senders. Even if the e-mail has been sent by a known person, the suggestion is to first confirm the content and reason, and then open it. Also, the most important tip is ensuring that latest patches and updates are installed for the operating system and antivirus.

Related article: ESET Discusses Malware Writers’ Trend

» SPAMfighter News - 2/12/2010