This Valentine is going to hurt

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NEW DELHI, INDIA: It would appear that Christmas is not over and it is not too early for Valentine's Day, as some of January's most prevalent attacks were spam disguised as Christmas greeting eCards or love letters.

Together, they represent more than 11 percent* of the total threats for the month of January. A report from Fortinet, provider of unified threat management (UTM) solutions has said that Valentine campaigns and Christmas greeting were among the top 10 most reported high-risk threats for January 2008.

The report was compiled by Fortinet's FortiGuard Global Security Research Team, using intelligence gathered from FortiGate multi-threat security systems in production worldwide.

Displaying the power of Storm, a new worm variant – Small.FQS – took the No. 3 position in a one-day Valentine's campaign. Arriving on January 16, Small.FQS charmed readers with emailed links to a Storm infection.

"With eCards and Valentine spam saturating email accounts along with other threats from last month, we would remind users to 'think before clicking that link.' In a cyber world littered with dark alleys, not everyone online is your friend," said Derek Manky, security research engineer for Fortinet. "It should be noted that most legitimate eCards come in the form of a link to the eCard hosting site, using a unique ID, rather than as attachments."

Trojans Pushu.BYC and Pushdo.DGH were responsible for the proliferation of Christmas greeting eCards, which earned them the No. 4 and No. 6 spots, respectively, on the top 10 threats list.

New adware Agent worked its way onto the top 10 list at No. 8, pushing Bdsearch and TCent from last month off the list.



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