Kaspersky Lab, a leading developer of secure content management solutions, has detected a large-scale mass mailing of Valentine’s Day spam. The message currently accounts for about 5% of all mail traffic checked by Kaspersky Hosted Security Services. The ‘Valentine’s Day’...
Kaspersky Lab, a leading developer of secure content management solutions, has detected a large-scale mass mailing of Valentine’s Day spam. The message currently accounts for about 5% of all mail traffic checked by Kaspersky Hosted Security Services.
The ‘Valentine’s Day’ mass mailing is of a global nature. It was first identified by Kaspersky Lab at 02.00 Moscow time on the morning of 12 February. It only started to circulate in the Russian segment of the Internet during the working day. At the time of publication, the number of spam messages of this type had still not decreased.
The text of the message asks the reader to click on a link to view a selection of Valentine’s Day ‘e-cards’. However, clicking on the link simultaneously downloads the malicious file Packed.Win32.Tibs.ic. The screenshots of the message and some of the e-cards are shown below:
The link in the message is displayed in the format http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx, where xxx is a number, which is unusual for this type of mailing. “We presume the peak in Valentine’s Day spam is still to come,” says Andrei Nikishin, director for IT security outsourcing at Kaspersky Lab. “According to our information, the leading sources of spam in 2007 were the USA at 11.2%, Russia – 10.8%, Poland – 6.6%, Germany – 5.8% and, in South-East Asia, South Korea and China at 6.2% and 4.5% respectively. The fact that spam is sent, for the most part, by zombie computers, means its quantity depends on the level of Internet penetration and the number of PCs. In Russia, spam stems, primarily, from cities with over 1 million inhabitants, where there are large numbers of PCs and access to the Internet is freely available.”
Kaspersky Hosted Security Services, a suite of outsourcing services, provides integrated protection against Internet threats for corporate networks of any size, as well as offering control over the use of Internet resources.
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Kaspersky Lab is the largest antivirus company in Europe. It delivers some of the world’s most immediate protection against IT security threats, including viruses, spyware, crimeware, hackers, phishing, and spam. The Company is ranked among the world’s top four vendors of security solutions for endpoint users. Kaspersky Lab products provide superior detection rates and one of the industry’s fastest outbreak response times for home users, SMBs, large enterprises and the mobile computing environment. Kaspersky® technology is also used worldwide inside the products and services of the industry’s leading IT security solution providers. Learn more at www.kaspersky.com. For the latest on antivirus, anti-spyware, anti-spam and other IT security issues and trends, visit www.viruslist.com.
