Not surprisingly, spammers have begun a new attack exploiting the upcoming Valentine’s Day holiday. New spam messages with subject lines such as “Falling in love with you”, “I belong to you”, and “I love being in love with you” have begun hitting inboxes. Security experts say the attack started on January 22nd. The body of the messages contain romantic sounding one liners like “Me and You”, “In Your Arms”, and “With all my love”, and a link. The link directs the recipent to a web page displaying 12 heart images and inviting them to click on one. Doing so downloads a malicious program called “love.exe” or “you.exe” which turns the infected computer into a zombie and adds it to the Waledec botnet, which is believed to be run by the same folks responsible for the Storm botnet. So far the botnet is sending an average of 11,000 messages per hour.
This is the same group responsible for the Obama spam sent earlier this month. That spam attempted to lure people to a fake Obama/Biden site with a link to a fake news story claiming Obama had abruptly declined to accept the presidency of the United States. This new botnet is growing so quickly it’s being called the new Storm botnet. It appears that the group behind it isn’t in a hurry to learn any new tricks because the old ones are still working just fine.
Source: http://www.allspammedup.com/2009/01/new-valentines-day-spam-attack-underway/