Valentine's Day Malware | Protect with Total Security

The dangerous Trojan Emotet is also involved

“You only have to be in love,” the Comedian Harmonists sang about love. It shouldn't be about anything else on February 14th, then it's Valentine's Day again. Cyber ​​criminals, however, make it difficult for people to expect and enjoy the lovebirds' day carefree. Phishing and malware campaigns take advantage of this day to infect computers, steal sensitive data and deceive their victims. This applies to private individuals as well as companies: If an employee falls for an attack attempt while he is with the device in the company network, not only he becomes the victim, but the entire company.

Cybercriminals are targeting Love's Day to expand their activities

It is therefore important to exercise caution. Security researchers found that in 2019 and 2020, the word "Valentine" appeared 200 percent more frequently on fraudulent websites in February than in previous months. Then the number drops sharply again. The number of the word "chocolate" rose by 500 percent in February 2019, compared to only 39 percent in 2020. This shows that such 'secondary words' are not often used regularly, but that catchwords are used by criminals who only indirectly have something to do with Valentine's Day. "Flowers" and "love" are further possible examples.

In this way, the criminals want to lure all users who are interested in Valentine's Day as a topic to their infected websites. The security researchers have found that in the first week of February alone, 10,000 domains containing the word "Valentine" were accessed by users worldwide.

 

There are also classic phishing e-mails that contain a fraudulent link to a website where the addressee's access data, credit card details, and other information are stolen. These attacks are often accompanied by malware attacks. In 2020, GandCrab ransomware became so widespread. Subject lines revolved around love greetings. This year, the security researchers found two similar malware campaigns: One wants to place the Ursnif Trojan, which targets Windows computers and collects system information, the other distributes the currently famous and unfortunately very successful - the Berlin Superior Court found it - Emotet Trojan. The latter has already been mentioned several times in connection with major events as an abused topic, like Halloween or New Year's, and famous people like Greta Thunberg rolled out to a large extent. Now the security researchers discovered the first spam e-mails relating to Valentine's Day. Users are urged to download a file that contains the Trojan. As soon as it is installed, Emotet opens a few back doors in the system to gain access to further malware.

Users can best protect themselves against damage from such attacks if they are careful not to follow phishing links or fall for infected websites. Often these can be identified by spelling errors in the text or the URL, or the sender address of the e-mail has a very dubious name, or dubious discounts are advertised, such as a discount on the new iPhone of 80 percent. On the other hand, in addition to the human component, a good IT security solution also helps to protect people and companies from harm. This should have a good zero-day protection that redirects such attacks to a sandbox with the help of "threat emulation" and isolates them there. The attackers are, so to speak, under quarantine. Also, such a defense is immune to all evasion techniques of the malicious programs.

Unfortunately, it is no longer enough to just be in love on Valentine's Day. Internet users must take a few simple precautions to be able to turtle in peace. Users should protect their data by installing advanced security protection like Protegent360's Total Security.