Johannesburg, 13 Feb 2009
Spammers are taking advantage of Valentine's Day. This is according to Symantec, which says in its latest security report that spam accounts for over 79% of all e-mail in recent days.
India-based security company Cyberoam concurs with Symantec. However, it says Valentine's Day spam is not just harmless spam advertising, but exposes a computer to additional malware threats, network slowdown, data loss and cost implications.
Dominic White, manager for security and privacy services for Deloitte and Touch, says: “My gut feel is that the spam increase this year will be consistent with previous year's growth. However, we have seen that closing down a single botnet, or arresting a single spam kingpin, can dramatically reduce the amount of spam and, if our enforcement starts to improve, we may start to see it drop.”
Beware of Waledec
The biggest e-mail threat at the moment, according to security companies, is the Waledec.Cworm, which uses the Valentine's Day theme.
Once a user opens the URL in the spammed message, the user is redirected to a Valentine's Day site which installs the malicious Waledec.Cworm onto the user's PC. The infected machine then attempts to find other IP addresses to continue spreading the malicious code.
According to Kaspersky Lab's statistics, on average about 1.5% of spam contains malicious code. However, it's not the only way of getting a malware onto computers. Some mails contain links to infected Web pages.
On the increase
Daria Gudkova, spam analysis and research group manager for Kaspersky Lab, says last month saw a 17% growth in spam. “This is probably resulting from the [financial] crisis when many companies became bankrupt and stopped using spam services. That's why spammers are now searching for new clients. Also on holidays, especially on Valentine's Day, there is an increase in the volume of spam mailing with malware that is often disguised as congratulatory cards.”
Jeremy Matthews, head of Panda Security's Sub-Saharan Africa operations, says: “Over the coming year, we'll be seeing more spam related to the current economic downturn, with lures of fake money-making opportunities being used as a hook.”
Security companies urge users not to open e-mails and attachments from untrustworthy sources. Computer systems and their applications should be updated with an anti-virus as often as possible, they say.
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