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Spammers Exploit Valentine’s Day to Infect Systems

According to Symantec's estimates, 10% of 10-20 Billion spam e-mails received per day worldwide contain the theme of Valentine's Day.

As a matter of fact, spammers have gained expertise to lure gullible users to open spam e-mails by using seasonal themes like Valentine's Day. Symantec has noted that a malware is embedded in most of these seasonal spam e-mails, which has the potential to monitor, disable or take complete control of the victim's system.

Paul Wood, Senior Intelligent Analyst, Symantec Hosted Services, said that since the beginning of 2010, the firm had been observing a steady rise in the usage of words related to Valentine's Day in spam e-mails, as per the statement published by thestandard on February 11, 2010.

Spammers always use typical 12 subject headers in spam e-mails specially designed for Valentine's Day, noted Symantec.

As this year Valentine's Day is falling on Sunday, it is highly recommended to the individuals, businesses or companies to be watchful against the suspicious e-mails.

According to the Internet Security Analyst at Network Box, Simon Heron, Valentine's Day is the perfect opportunity for the phishers to catch unsusceptible people because this day people receive messages from anonymous admirers, and in terms of security, this is quite dangerous, as reported by prfire on February 10, 2010.

Therefore, Heron has suggested to the businesses that they should ensure that their systems are well updated and patched, and the workforce should know about the rising risk.

This special occasion of Valentine's Day is highly vulnerable. To avoid being exploited by the significant event, security experts suggest that PC users should employ e-mail security solution which is specially designed to protect them from malware and spam but allow legitimate e-mails. Further, another important thing to remain protected is avoid opening of doubtful e-mails and clicking on suspicious links.

Finally, the users should have one e-mail address specifically for personal use meant for colleagues, friends and family. For various other purposes like mailing lists, newsletters, orders and enquiries, etc, another e-mail address can be created, according to the recommendations given by security experts.

Related article: Spammers Continue their Campaigns Successfully

» SPAMfighter News - 2/12/2010

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