Storm Valentines run under way

Seasonal spam and malware barrage gets going.

The expected run of ‘Storm’ spams, pushing links to their latest line of malware disguised as Valentine’s messages, has begun, with many reports of spams appearing all over the world.

The Storm botnet controllers have got their timing back on track, after a

previous batch

of Valentine messages were released early in January. The current run of spams follow the usual formula, presenting anonymous messages of love and affection and linking to a website which attempts to download a malicious file, in many cases rather unimaginatively titled ‘valentine.exe’.

Some details and screenshots of the latest run are at

F-Secure


here

and at

Trend Micro


here

. The FBI has issued a warning about such spams,

here

.

Of course, other spam operations are taking advantage of the occasion to send out targeted messages, and other current events are also being used for malware and scam purposes – these include the upcoming tax deadline in Australia, as detailed by

Trend


here

.

Posted on 12 February 2008 by

Virus Bulletin