AMSTERDAM, 9th of February 2010. The perfect spam attack, disguised in a romantic message, is ready to attack you: Valentine's spam. The well intended e-cards can place your address to an email list or your email address may even sold to third parties.
Valentine's Day is only a few days away and truly a red mark on every security vendor's calendar. Receiving millions of Valentine's messages to your inbox could make you feel that you are really loved and even though that is probably true, the intention of the e-cards more often than not is to scam you! For example, by clicking on a link to view your personally addressed e-card, you could get infected with a virus or even become part of a botnet.
During Valentine's day, internet users have to be extremely careful. “We have noticed high peaks in our statistics in the previous years, and users that are not well protected do risk a virus or even identity theft”, according to Dreas van Donselaar, CTO of the email security firm SpamExperts. “We advise everybody to not open any emails from unknown sources and not click on any links that are included in their Valentine email messages. File attachments should also not be opened if they are from unknown sources.”.
Subjects that are most frequent used for spam messages are for example breaking news items or international happenings. Professional email security firms are aware of these 'attack waves' and are very well prepared. Not making use of a professional spam filter can have big consequences, especially after such waves.
