What You DON’T Want for Valentine’s Day
It’s February 14th, and you’re slugging through the work day, counting down the hours until the romantic dinner you planned tonight with your sweetie.
An unexpected e-mail pops into your inbox. Someone sent you a Valentine’s Day e-card! “Click here to retrieve your greeting,” instructs the message.
“How sweet,” you gush in excited anticipation, as you dutifully click on the email’s embedded link to retrieve your e-card.
Oops. What unleashes next is anything but words of endearment. It’s the Storm Worm virus, and faster than you can say “Roses are Red”, malware is downloaded to your PC. Congratulations! You’ve been infected, and are now the latest unwitting victim of the Storm Worm botnet.
Not exactly the love you were looking for, but you’re far from alone. According to Time Magazine, the Storm Worm virus has already infected upwards of one million computers worldwide since it was first discovered about a year ago.
Looks like you’ll have to wait for that romantic dinner after all, since this e-card was actually spam in disguise.
If you haven’t heard of the Storm Worm virus, it spreads itself under a wide range of pretenses - most recently under the guise of an e-card, and often around popular holidays like Christmas or Valentine’s Day. A recent FBI warning announced that this Valentine’s Day is expected to be the next big target. Additional warnings have been showing up on numerous web sites, including this one from Network World.
This is just one real-life example of how quickly and easily malicious threats can wreak havoc on your corporate network. At RADirect, we’ve noticed an increase lately in organizations (especially SMBs and extra-vulnerable business like hospitals and universities) looking for a solution to protect themselves from such attacks.
We recommend and sell the Radware DefensePro (starting at $9995) intrusion prevention system (IPS). This solution is unique because it has the ability to detect and block both known (signature-based) AND unknown (zero-day) attacks, like Storm Worm and the similarly destructive Rahack. The latter is done via adaptive behavioral analysis, and requires no human intervention.
And by the way, if you do fall victim to the Storm Worm virus, you can notify the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) by filing a complaint at IC3.gov.
So, Happy Valentine’s Day! Hope yours is filled with love, romance, and absolutely nothing involving worms or viruses.