Watch out for Amorous Viruses and Mydoom Backdoors

Every year, as Valentine’s Day approaches, there is a marked increase in the amount of e-mails containing graphic applications or romantic messages. “This situation is often exploited by virus writers to create malicious code designed to trick users into running the file containing the virus,” says Luis Corrons, head of PandaLabs.

Worms that have recently appeared using this technique include Mimail.S, which is sent in a message with the text: “my dear”, “my dearest”, or “my darling”. Others include the veteran Klez.I worm, which varies the subject of the message it is sent in. This characteristic, which makes it particularly difficult for users to identify infected messages, generates the subject phrase from words that it gleans from files on the computer it has infected. “Around this time of year, users often have files stored on their computers with some kind of romantic reference, which could mean that Klez.I could appear disguised in some kind of romantic message,” says Corrons.

To prevent unwanted encounters with ‘amorous’ viruses, Panda Software advises users to take precautions, especially at a time when new malicious code could take advantage of the holes created in computers infected by Mydoom. According to Corrons, “The A and B variants of Doomjuice, DoomHunter.A and Mitglieder.A, which have appeared this week and use the ports opened by Mydoom.A and Mydoom.B in infected computers, will probably not be isolated cases, and are likely to be followed by a string of copycats taking advantage of the lack of awareness among users to infect as many computers as possible.”

The measures advised by Panda Software include having a good, reliable antivirus uninstalled and not opening mail without scanning it first with this application. It is also important to be careful when browsing dubious web pages as they could well contain malicious code -Trojans in particular- which download onto the users computer.