Valentine’s lures lead to infection

Predicted spate of romance hooks under way.

After numerous security watchers predicted a barrage of phishing and malware attacks associated with Valentine’s Day this week, the first waves of such attacks have been seen, with the latest featuring pictures of cute puppies being used to soften defences and lead victims to infectious trojans.

Spammed emails adorned with pictures of a pair of puppies carrying a Valentine’s heart promise users a ‘Valentine’s DevKit’, which is in fact a malicious file which adds infected systems to the ‘Waledac’ botnet. The botnet is controlled by the same cybercrooks who used similarly timely social engineering tactics focusing on last month’s inauguration of US president Barack Obama. The infection is believed by many to be the latest iteration of the ‘Storm’ attacks which did so well with similar tactics last year.

Details on the latest attack, including screenshots of the puppies, are at

Mcafee


here

or at

Websense


here

.

Posted on 10 February 2009 by

Virus Bulletin