Valentine Or Virus?
It could be a Happy Virus Day for you as virus writers love to take advantage of the blizzard of e-greeting cards swirling around the Internet.
Finnish anti-virus firm F-Secure warns that the poisoned love letters already are circulating. The company says it has intercepted a nasty virus included in a spam campaign. The virus is disguised as a Valentine's Day greeting relayed via e-greeting card giant AmericanGreetings.com. According to F-Secure, when an e-card recipient clicks on the related e-mail link, it redirects you to a page asking you to install a fake Macromedia Flash Player by Adobe. This player actually is a Trojan horse program that downloads and installs a password-stealing virus onto the user's system.
I've never been fond of the e-greeting card industry, mainly because it conditions people to click on e-mail links they weren't necessarily expecting or have no reason to trust.
Please be careful about clicking on links in any e-greetings you receive today. If you absolutely must watch some dancing chocolates or flying hearts via Flash animation but are not sure whether you already have a Flash player, this link here will help. It will tell you if you have it installed and which version you're running. Windows users with Flash installed should be running the latest 9.0.28.0 version.
If you need a current version or wish to install it, download it directly from the source.
By Brian Krebs |
February 14, 2007; 1:01 PM ET
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Posted by: Shanda | February 15, 2007 12:19 PM
A cursory glance would have it appear that they hacked American Greetings' DNS servers and pointed them to Bot malware servers?
Posted by: Moike | February 15, 2007 1:31 PM
Scot Finnie did a long, detailed analysis of antivirus programs that spanned multiple issues of his newsletter. See scotsnewsletter.com. He liked NOD32 in the end.
As for the Flash player, be aware that it has to be installed into each browser and that it is very possible to have different versions in use by different browsers on the same machine.
Posted by: Michael | February 17, 2007 12:49 AM
Unfortunately, I clicked on the flash player
upgrade. All webpages in browsers freeze frequently, and this msg.window keeps freezing too, so it's taking along time to complete this msg. Able to get/send email so far. I'm concerned ab't the security of my pass word(s). I'd appreciate any thot's as to what can be done. Thanx.
Posted by: tamie | February 17, 2007 11:00 PM
Posted by: Rick | February 20, 2007 7:21 PM
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Hello,
I would like to know what is the best anti-virus software for a home computer? How do you really know what is real or not when it asks you to download anti-virus software? Thanks