Spammers Increasingly Luring Users with Shortened URLs
G Data Software, one of the world’s first antivirus providers, reports a massive increase in spam related to Valentine’s Day, with online criminals directing unsuspecting users to fraudulent websites offering promotions on flowers, forged jewelry, perfume, and other Valentine’s Day gifts. The cyber criminals then trick users into disclosing their credit card information. Security Labs also predicts a barrage of Valentine’s Day greetings cards that contain infected files or links to infected websites to flood inboxes on Monday. Security Labs advise extreme caution against all Valentine’s Day spam, in particular shortened URLs that don’t allow you to see the full URL the link directs to.
“Every year around Valentine’s day the amount of spam emails skyrockets. Criminals choose occasions like this to collect credit card data and other personal information of unsuspecting users,” said Eddy Willems, security evangelist for Security Labs. “This year, we’ve seen a troubling spike in this activity and strongly recommend not opening any spam emails and deleting them right away.”
This Valentine’s Day, cyber criminals are expected to increasingly target social networks, like Facebook and Twitter, with shortened web links on clipboards and in personal messages. This way, infected code can be downloaded and installed on a PC, if no effective real-time protection is in place. Criminals tend to prefer the URL shortening service “ow.ly” because it provides no preview function and completely obscures the actual website it points to.
Sample of a current Valentine’s Day spam email:
The server this email originates from is located in Asia – reiterating the global scope of this issue.
Tags: antivirus, malware. security, spam, Valentine's Day
