While Valentine’s is still away, there are those who might be looking around online for gift ideas, places to celebrate, including people to meet. Upfront, this may seem like a pretty harmless activity but in reality, cyber criminals have already started sending malicious Valentine-related spam to users with bogus advertisements, promotions, and offers.
Trend Micro’s Managing Director, India & SEA Dhanya Thakkar, said, “Trend Micro found 117 unique sender IPs related to this spam run. Most of the spammed emails primarily came from the United States, followed by India, Ukraine, Canada, and the Netherlands. This slew of Valentine’s Day-themed emails came in different languages such as German and Chinese. Instead of flowers or candy, spammers gifted their recipients with emails about dating sites, scams, and spam-vertisements (advertisements seen inside spammed emails),”
Like other special occasions, Valentine’s Day is usually, if not always, used by attackers as a way to hook potential victims. After all, the more people get busy online, the more opportunities there are for the bad guys to prey on the excitement of unwitting users. Whether it’s tricking them into clicking on fake ads found on social media posts, or opening malicious email attachments, these social engineering lures can lead to a number of online risks.
Trend Micro threat researchers have found a variety of spam emails with Valentine’s Day used as keywords within parts of the messages. The Valentine’s Day-themed emails instead of leading users to actual Valentines-related sites, the recipients are led to scams and spam-vertisements (advertisements seen inside spammed emails). As expected, spammers, scammers, and other online predators would be on the loose this Valentine’s Day and users should be more cautious when opening email attachments, clicking on links, sharing things on social media, and visiting websites.
Another security company, Wegilant has also warned users to stay alert while making in-app purchases or clicking on unknown links from Android apps as their recent report suggests that Android is the most vulnerable Operating System. The flagship product of Wegilant is Appvigil, which is a cloud based android app security scanner. Appvigil looks for security vulnerabilities and loopholes in android apps. In layman terms, it helps you identify whether an android app is hackable or not.
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