Why hackers love you on Valentine’s Day

Valentine’s Day once again provided a bonanza for hackers anticipating that consumers got weak at the knees with the mention of the ‘L’ word. A decade ago, the I LOVE YOU virus spread from one machine to another since few consumers used protection at the time. A decade later, ‘iloveyou’ is the fifth most common password, ‘lovely’ is number 18 and ‘loveu’ is  number 23 and ‘loveme’ is number 43.

Hackers looked likely concoct a special Valentine potion using the promise of being secretly admired combined with our prevailing addiction to sharing personal information on social networks like Facebook. Hackers get a complete list of friends for many users. Then, they send to that certain someone a Valentine messages seemingly coming from a friend. Urged to click a Valentine’s Card to retrieve virtual chocolates or roses, you end up instead with a virus.

“The success of such a campaign is in numbers,” commented Amichai Shulman, CTO of Imperva. “For this, the hacker adds a key ingredient – automation. Using an automated tool, the hacker scrapes friends lists from Facebook and turns them into a phishing mail, all in a single click of the mouse, to spread their virus. What can you do next time? First, look up who sent you the Valentine’s greeting and make sure it’s legitimate. Do not follow links or download software referencing unsolicited spam; update your computer with the latest patches; ensure your anti-virus is enabled and up-to-date; if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.  Nothing bad will happen if you simply hit delete.”