Panda Security SA CE Jeremy Matthews says his company's laboratories have detected two new worms that use the topic "Valentine's Day" to spread. They are Nuwar.OL and Valentin.E.
"Year after year, we see the appearance of several malware strains that use St Valentine's Day as bait to lure users," Matthews says. "This indicates that cyber-crooks are still reaping the benefits of this technique and many people still fall into the trap."
Nuwar.OL reaches computers by e-mail with subjects like "I Love You Soo Much", "Inside My Heart" or "You... In My Dreams". The text of the e-mail includes a link to a Web site that downloads the malicious code. The page is very simple and looks like a romantic greeting card, with a large pink heart.
Once it has infected a computer, the worm sends out a large amount of e-mails to the infected user's contacts, in order to spread. This also creates a heavy load on networks and slows down the computer.
Valentin.E is very similar. Like the Nuwar worm, it spreads by e-mail, in messages with subjects like "Searching for True Love" or "True Love" and an attached file called "friends4u". If the targeted user opens the file, a copy of the worm will be downloaded.
The malicious code installs on the computer as a file with the .scr extension. If the user runs it, Valentin.E shows a new desktop background to trick them, while it makes several copies of itself on the computer.
Then, the worm sends out e-mails with copies of itself from the infected computer to spread and infect more users.
"Both cases are clear examples of social engineering techniques used to spread malware. They use attractive subjects - Valentine's Day greeting cards, romantic desktop themes, etc - to entice users to run attachments or click links that ultimately download malware onto their computers," says Matthews.
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