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Valentine virus
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The lovey dovey messages flooding your inbox today should be dealt with caution
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IT PAYS to show patience, especially on Valentine's Day. The issue under spotlight is your computer. If you are eager to open all those Valentine Day messages in your inbox, here's a word of caution. A virus could just cause your computer to crash. Some of them could be genuine messages, but be careful if you are prompted to open email attachments - even if they are sent from known addresses.
Valentine Day email messages may not be as innocuous as they appear to be. A click on the attachment file could very well crash your computer or throw it open for remote handling by cyber criminals. Or your computer could begin spamming your contacts from your address list.
We are talking about viruses unleashed in the cyber world disguised as Valentine Day's messages. Security experts have already detected two new viruses spreading across the cyber world. Just like other viruses, the new viruses - Kipis-H worm and VBSWG-D worm ride piggyback on greetings as attachments.
Here is how they spread from computer to computer. Emails carrying Kipis-H has the subject line "Happy Valentine's Day" and the message would be "With the coming Valentine's Day ! I very much love you. Attachment: Valentine.EXE".
Harmless it reads, but once activated Kipis does some strange things. It would disable the anti-virus programmes on your computer, install a Trojan which would enable the cyber criminals to monitor your computer and then start sending itself to all contacts in your address book with your email ID.
The other worm VBSWG-D has the subject line "first Love Story... !!!" and has a file with name FirstLove.VBS. Compared to Kipis, this worm does more harm. On the Valentine's Day, it dons a more aggressive form. It would display a different message "Happy F***ing Valentine... !!!" and then shut down the computer. By this time, it would have mailed itself to all your contacts.
Kipis and VBSWG are the two latest malwares that have been doing rounds. It is not the first time that malicious code writers have lured email users to open attachments in the name of love messages.
Here is a list of other such viruses, which literally created havoc.
Love Bug: Billed as the biggest virus outbreak of all times, it was unleashed in May 2000. Has subject line "ILOVEYOU" and claimed to contain a love letter.
Bagle-W: Came with the subject line "I just need a friend" in April 2004 pretending to be from a woman who was seeking "interesting and active man looking for serious relations" The message would contain pictures of a young woman.
Lovelet-C: Started doing rounds in 2000 inviting people to have a date over a cup of coffee.
Wurmark: Mails originated from a fictitious name "RomeoRichard" and "Sexy_guy88".
Yaha-K: Had subject line like "Wanna be my sweetheart?", "You are so sweet" and "Are you looking for love". Once activated, Yaha began to launch a Denial of Service (DoS) attack on Pakistani Government websites by spamming the sites with messages.
Numgame: It would ask the recipient "Are you my valentine?" and would begin playing an onscreen game with infected users even as it would start mailing itself.
K. SRINIVAS REDDY
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