Beware the malware
Valentine’s Day starts early this year, beware the malware inflection by email spam.
Jan26 -WALEDAC Loves (to Spam) You! by Florabel Baetiong (Anti-spam Research Engineer)
Holidays and popular annual events as a social engineering tool in spamming is a signature Storm technique. The following spammed email message should then cement WALEDAC’s association with the said bot giant.
These messages flood inboxes weeks before Valentine’s day, also typical of previous Storm spam runs. Clicking on the link redirects a user to a site with a heart images. When this page is clicked, the user is prompted to download a file, malicious of course, detected by Trend Micro as WORM_WALEDAC.AR.
WORM_WALEDAC.AR propagates by spamming email messages with malicious links where copies of the same worm are downloaded. Like other WALEDAC variants, it compromises the security of infected systems by opening random ports to listen for commands from a remote user.
These other earlier threats by this same malware family exhibit routines and characteristics very similar to Storm: