While most sane people around the world are enjoying a romantic Valentine’s Day today, we at SophosLabs remain vigilant on the front line of the war against malware.
This year, Valentines Day coincides with the Chinese New Year as well as the start of the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, and many malware attacks have centred around SEO poisoning of these and other topical search terms.
The Chinese New Year of the Tiger is proving a popular target, especially as this ties in with any Tiger Woods related searches:
As we are seeing on a daily basis, topical issues that have spawned a large number of searches become the target of Fake AV authors:
Tragic events are also fair game:
As well as having up to date Anti Virus one way to avoid attacks such as these is to use a browser plugin such as NoScript that blocks the execution of JavaScript from untrusted sources.
So far I haven’t seen any “Free tickets to Paris for Valentine’s Day” spam but there’s always next year I suppose…