The FBI has issued a warning about opening Valentine's Day emails that might contain e-cards that deliver a trojan worm to the recipient.
"If you unexpectedly receive a Valentine's Day e-card, be careful," the Federal Bureau of Investigation said in a statement, warning Internet users to "be on the lookout for spam emails spreading the Storm Worm malicious software (malware)."
"The Storm Worm virus has capitalized on various holidays in the last year by sending millions of emails advertising an e-card link within the text of the spam email. Valentine's Day has been identified as the next target," the FBI said.
The bogus email directs the recipient to click on a link to retrieve an electronic Valentine's Day card.
If the user falls for the ruse, malware will infect their computer or the device they used to connect to the Internet, and make it become part of a Storm Worm botnet, according to the FBI.
Very nice. Frankly, I never open anything like that (my wife doesn't send stuff like that, nor do I send any to her). It probably isn't a real good idea to open one even if you know the sender – because their machine might be infected and the greeting might be coming from the botnet. Kind of a sad state of affairs.
I got one myself today. Fortunately I was clever enough to figure out that I don’t actually have a secret admirer.
In cyberspace there are the “protected and aware” and the “technologically impaired fools” who spread viruses faster than Typhoid Mary.
Some people are clueless that Hallmark e-cards collect information. Nothing is “free” folks.
I have McAfee running and also delete anything with an attachment. Some of my so called acquaintances who practice unsafe commuting and fwd:fwd:fwd get sent immediately to the deleted bin.
McAfee also has a site adviser that tests web site links. Some of the Chinese sites linked through the crabitat show up with a warning not to follow any links.
commuting = computing, almost the same.
Which ones, Pete?
< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> < !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
This one Gaius, Not a biggie but flagged by my software. (deleted) The warning was to not follow any of the links. I didn't comment because it made sense. This is the only site you linked that said this though, so I should have been more alert. Pete
I broke the links, Pete. Thank you.