People Warned of Valentine’s Day-Related Spam

Security researchers are alerting that cyber-criminals are gearing up for February 14, 2011 the Valentine's Day by readying a tempting collection of scams that are related to Internet spam. Securitynewsdaily.com reported this on February 2, 2011.

Involving fake e-greeting cards, the above spam scams frequently direct recipients to load a program so they can see the card. However, the program is actually malicious as it takes users onto fake anti-virus (AV) software alternatively other malicious content that gets loaded onto their systems, security researchers observe.

Worryingly, investigators at ESET a security company have by now found malicious programs on many websites whose URLs contain the word "Valentine," Director of Technical Education Randy Abrams at ESET stated. SCMagazineUS.com reported this on February 3, 2011.

Furthermore, it's possible that cyber-criminals will employ SEO (search engine optimization) techniques for corrupting Web-requests related to Valentine's Day in order that their malevolent web-links may acquire higher rankings among the search results.

Says Abrams that this is the period every year when there are more-and-more online searchers associated with Valentine's Day. The Internet crooks are aware of the things the public hunt for and so they attempt at trapping Web-surfers through the poisoning of search results that eventually push those surfers onto their malware, he explains.

Stated Global Director of Education David Perry at Trend Micro, cyber-criminals would also probably spread malware campaigns using the Valentine's Day theme across social-networking websites like Facebook. SCMagazineUS.com reported this.

The researchers note that indeed cyber-criminals, nowadays, tend to particularly attack Facebook and Twitter the social-networking websites.

Eventually they observe that as spammers and malware-distributors get more-and-more tech-savvy, it becomes imperative that Internet-users increase their vigilance as also adopt all possible measures for personal safeguard. According to them, although there's no really sound method for making oneself 100% secure from malware attacks and Internet fraud especially during this seasonal event, yet there are some easy measures with which the Internet security of a person can be greatly maintained. Accordingly, high-quality software must be used that's regularly updated as well as products should be bought only from reputed Internet sites as they're usually malware-free.

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» SPAMfighter News - 2/10/2011