Security firms are warning that cybercriminals are attempting to infect the PCs of innocent surfers by convincing them that they have a secret admirer.

Anyone who opens the email is putting themselves at risk of losing their own personal information, as well as allowing hackers to remotely control the PC for their own ends.

The emails have subject lines such as "Love Rose", "Rockin' Valentine" and "Just You" and contain a file called valentine.exe.

Greg Day, security analyst at McAfee, said: "This virus will try to steal the personal information you keep on your PC, try to bring down your security defences and sign your machine up to an online army.

"This means that your PC can be used to blast out millions of junk emails and to carry out denial of service attacks – by flooding a computer, system or website with so much information that it brings it down," continued Day.

Another security firm warned that sometimes the attachment isn't actually the infected file itself, but a piece of code that directs your PC to find the malware online.

"The advantage of this method is that since it's a hosted file, they can change the malicious code as and when they want. This enables them to churn out variants at will without having to take the pains of resending the emails again," said Govind Rammurthy of MicroWorld Technologies.

This new attack is linked to the Storm Trojan, which first emerged more than a year ago and attempts to use events such as Christmas, the New Year and Easter to spread itself.

"Like other threats, the Storm Worm continues to use world events to successfully dupe users – from New Year Celebrations in December 2006 to the European floods in April last year and now this – so we all need to stay vigilant," said McAfee's Day.

Another security firm, F-Secure, warned that the gang behind the Storm worm would carry on beyond Valentine's Day.

"They'll keep on doing it as long as people keep falling for it," said F-Secure's Wing Fei Chia.

It's not the first time Valentine-related malware has been spotted this year either. Similar emails were circulating almost a month before 14 February.

www.mcafee.com
www.f-secure.co.uk

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