Panda Security: First Valentine’s Day malware attacks
February 2009 by Panda
This is a classic in the malware world. As February 14 approaches, security vendors start to detect dozens of malware strains aimed at infecting users’ computers using Valentine’s Day as bait. The first one to appear this year has been the Waledac.C worm.
As is usually the case in this type of attack, Waledac.C spreads by email trying to pass itself off as a greetings card sent for Valentine’s Day to the targeted user. The email message includes a link to download the card. However, if the user clicks the link and accepts the subsequent file download they will actually be letting the Waledac.C worm into their computer.
These malicious files have Valentine’s Day-related romantic names such as:
youandme.exe
onlyyou.exe
you.exe
meandyou.exe
Once it has infected the computer, the worm uses the affected user’s email to send out spam. To do this, it collects all the email addresses stored on the user’s computer, and sends them an email message like the one above in order to trick other users into downloading the malware strain.
“The fact that cyber-crooks keep using this technique year after year shows that, old as it may be, it still causes a large number of infections”, says Luis Corrons, Technical Director of PandaLabs.