By Dr. Security

Last Valentine’s Day, John Gable, Check Point’s Director of Product Management and Product Marketing wrote on this blog about the Waledac botnet attacks.

John stated: “This botnet is running a Valentine’s Day ‘campaign’ soliciting people with phony Valentine’s themed e-mails and greeting cards. When users click through to a Web site to receive their messages, malicious software is silently and automatically downloaded to their computer.”

You might want to read this blog, in case you didn’t read it last year: http://blog.zonealarm.com/blog/2009/02/waledac-valentines-day-attack-stopped-by-zonealarm-forcefield.html.

I have already received a suspicious email, supposedly from Hallmark. The first thing that made me think this was a phony was the subject line, the headline, and the first sentence of the email all said the same thing: “You have received a Hallmark E-card.” (see below)

Seems pretty redundant and doesn’t seem very creative to say the exact same thing three times, does it? Hallmark is a company that is based upon a large amount of creativity. They hire creative people with the ability to compose just the right thing or to write something better than we could come up with on our own. That’s why we buy cards or e-cards from them. So it stands to reason a Hallmark copywriter didn’t compose this email.

Now, if you weren’t suspicious by the lack of creativity in the text. Check out the graphics. Look at the menu bar where you see the “Hallmark” logo first, then “Shop Online”, etc. Anything stand out? If you said the fourth item “E-Cards” looks weird, I’d totally agree with you. Now, would Hallmark send out an email with such amateurish graphics? I don’t think so.

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