Why Hackers Love You on Valentines Day

A Day for ProtectionOver a decade ago, computer users learned quickly that the meaning of protection on Valentine’s Day extended to their cyber activities as well–the I LOVE YOU virus quickly spread over the Internet because so few consumers even knew what antivirus was, let alone used it.

Stormy RelationshipThe extremely damaging Storm worm was able to wreak a lot of destruction around Valentine’s Day 2008 by preying upon users’ unbridled hope for secret admirers. One of the main methods of spreading Storm was through an infected link that supposedly would download a Valentine’s e-card.

Buggin’ to Send a Love MessageStorm is hardly the only virus to take advantage of users’ penchant for opening ‘love notes’ from unverified sources. Another popular means of exploit has been the W32/Dref-AB worm, which spread around on e-mail attachments labled postcard.exe, greeting card.exe and the like on messages with subject lines such as "The Valentine Love Bug." That’s truth in advertising, we suppose.

‘Lovely’ PasswordsAccording to the New York Times, "”iloveyou” is the fifth most common password, “lovely” is number 18, “loveu” is number 23 and “loveme” is number 43.

Spamtacular ShoppingThe bad guys prey upon computer users’ penchant for buying all of those more interesting and scandalous V-day gifts over the anonymous Internet by spamming the heck out of our inboxes with bogus offers for penis enhancements by the messageful. Last year’s top three Valentine’s spam headers, according to Symantec:* Increase your length, the best valentine’s gift* Show off your length for valentine’s* Get it before Valentine’s day and watch her smile

Status Update: InfectedThis year the trend for attacks will likely center around Facebook. Hackers will try to scrape friend lists from users and then supposedly send messages ‘from’ those friends that include infected links and messages to retrieve virtual chocolates or roses by clicking said links. Users need to be reminded to use their heads, even if the message if from someone they know, Shulman says."Chances are your 5th grade teacher did not and still does not have a crush on you. Chances are your neighbor isn’t suddenly into knowing you intimately,” he says.