Ah, Valentine’s Day, the time of year when suddenly everyone is starry-eyed and declaring their love for one another. Our eagerness to please our loved ones tends to make us a little more vulnerable. And this makes us perfect prey to scammers who pounce on these vulnerabilities to spread their viruses and scams.
According to Wikipedia, Valentine’s Day is an annual holiday held on February 14 celebrating love and affection between intimate companions. Well, hackers and scammers like to spread their ‘love’ too and they are getting ready. Like Hallmark, they know how weak consumers can get with mention of the ‘L’ word. In 2000, tens of millions of Windows computers were bit by the ‘Love Bug’ when it was sent as an attachment to an email message with the text ‘ILOVEYOU’ in the subject line. Upon opening the attachment, the worm sent a copy of itself to everyone in the Windows Address Book with the user’s sender address. It also made a number of malicious changes to the user’s system. What can we say? Everyone wants to be LOVED! Although this attack didn’t actually happen on Valentine’s Day, the Love Bug has become associated with it over time.
Will cupid strike this year? It’s not really a question of if; it’s more like ‘how.’ While we can’t predict what scheme hackers will cook up, we can only guess that social networking sites will somehow be involved. With the plethora of information available on sites like Twitter and Facebook, social networking sites have become as popular as email for spammers to spread their malware.
Five ways to stay ‘safe’ this Valentine’s Day
It’s really no different from any other time of the year but declarations of love seem to make people drop their guard.
1- Don’t open email messages from unknown senders. No matter how tempting or cute it may seem, if it’s too good to be true, it probably is!
2- Random declarations of love from people you don’t really know. Let’s face it, we’ve all ‘friended’ acquaintances on Facebook: people we’ve met once or twice, long lost classmates/teachers etc. Chances are they won’t be emailing you a Valentine’s Day card or declaring their love for you anytime soon. See it? Hit Delete!
3- Declarations of love from people you do know. Chances are your significant other/best friend/mom/grandma (well, maybe grandma) won’t be sending you and 25 other people the same message. Check for suspicious looking information in the ‘To’ field such as the sender’s entire address book.
4- Do not follow links to sites that you have never heard of. Typing the URL in the browser is a better way to verify it, and if the website doesn’t look familiar close the browser. Same thing goes if you are making online Valentine’s Day purchases. It’s safer to type the address of the store than going directly through links sent to you.
5- Nothing says ‘I love you’ better than picking up the phone (remember that?!). Nothing bad will happen if you delete an email that you are not sure of!
Final word of advice: don’t get caught with the Love Bug this Valentine’s Day. Make sure the only Trojans you get are the ones you buy from your local (not online) pharmacy.
I remember ‘I Love you’ well. At the time, we were using it as a sign of being dense. Whoever you received that email from had to be lacking in intellectual heft. First received it from our then VP of Sales. Unfortunately, a few hours later it came in from one of our best programmers!
Just goes to show 2 things:
i) we all need love
ii) even the smartest folks can fall for this kind of stuff