The Month of Valentine’s Spam
- Monday, February 2, 2009, 16:14
- Threat Research
For those who think the holidays always start too early, guess what? It is time to get your Valentine’s on. Well, at least spammers think so. Avert Labs started seeing Valentine enticing spam on January 22, and it has been increasing steadily since. Currently we are tracking Valentine’s spam to be between 1 percent and 2 percent of the total email sent on a daily basis.
Typical subjects we are seeing include “Deeply in love with you,” “I knew I loved you,” and “I love being with you.” A sample email of the “Only you in my heart” spam is shown below.
Once the reader opens the email a URL is available to click on. It’s not surprising that the URL points to a site that contains malware. The display seen below entices the viewer to click on one of the hearts. The binary file meandyou.exe is downloaded if a heart is selected.
Spurred on by this new outbreak of Valentine’s spam, overall spam volumes continue to climb back to pre-McColo takedown levels. Spam in January of this year is within 10 percent of spam from last January, and within the last few days spam is within 20 percent of pre-takedown levels. Spam reached record highs last March and with spammers
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