Watch out for upcoming Valentine's Day malware
Secret crushes. Fancy chocolates. Tawdry lingerie. Who doesn't love the temptations of Valentine's Day?
Of course, no one loves that day more than hackers, who prey on your excitement over forbidden love and the promise of romance, using it as a convenient excuse to inject copious amounts of malware into your computer.
Today Symantec offers both a warning and a history lesson on how the promise of love has been used as a sneaky and underhanded instrument by the malware creators of the world for years... and they're likely to keep doing so.
Probably the most noteworthy love-oriented malware attack is the "ILOVEYOU" (aka "LOVELETTER") attack, which began making the rounds via email in May 2000. Back then, computer users weren't accustomed to the crush of subject lines like "Somebody Loves You" and "Love at first sight," and the result was that millions of users double-clicked the ValentineCard.exe application each message contained as an attachment. The damage from the virus was incredible, as it replicated incredibly quickly via email, destroying thousands of files on each machine it infected along the way. About 10 percent of all Internet-connected PCs were affected, with some figures placing the total damage at $5.5 billion.
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