February Spam Highlights

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Kaspersky Lab found that many malicious attachments in February's spam came in emails allegedly sent by women who wanted to make new friends in the run-up to Valentine's Day. Some attackers went even further by trying to hook recipients with the promise of explicit photos in archives attached to messages.

There were also more conventional malicious mass mailings imitating fake notifications from popular social networking sites, including Facebook.

February's love-themed malicious spam was dominated by Trojans, as the cybercriminals' mass mailings targeted credulous users with a Trojan-Dropper. The Trojan installs two malicious programs on the system - one is spyware that steals all document files (*. Docx, *. Xlsx, *. Pdf) from the computer and sends them to a specific mailbox; another is IRC-bot/worm called ShitStorm which can carry out DDoS attacks on websites and spread copies of itself via MSN and P2P services. If recipients respond to this sort of email, their computer can easily become part of a botnet. Read more.