Clicks, not kiss, spread Valentine’s Day virus

Those who warn that embracing the Valentine’s Day culture could spawn deadly viruses in India may be right - but only if they are referring to online infections that wreck computers and destroy PCs’ immunity against hackers.

IT experts have asked netizens to guard against a debilitating virus that may hide amid the seductive messages of Valentine’s Day, and infiltrate computers posing as declarations of love.

The experts have advised that you should watch out for an email, perhaps with the subject, ‘Will you be my Valentine?’, sent exactly at 12 am on February 14. An attack planned to coincide with an event is carried out by what, in IT argot, is called a ‘scheduled virus’.
Clicking on the attachment of a malicious mail may unleash an attack that could crash your computer and throw it open to remote handling by cyber criminals.

Or, your computer could begin spamming your own contacts taken from your address list. An Ahmedabad-based ethical hacker, Sunny Vaghela, said, “People would become truly lovesick if they let the virus run on their PCs by opening unsolicited Valentine’s Day messages.”

He said that when a link is accessed in such an email, the virus is downloaded and installed on the computer. “That will facilitate the hacking of data and information stored in the computer,” he said.

The scheduled virus, experts say, may begin to spread from February 14 through emails, videos, pictures and links featuring Valentine’s Day messages. Even mobile phones could be targeted, making them unwitting transmitters of the virus through text messages and MMSes. Recently, a virus slithering inside a Valentine’s Day promotional offer, sent by a Nigerian hacker, crippled mobile phones in India and several foreign countries.

The hacker had rigged the message to make it seem as though the service provider was the sender.