Press Releases

Why Hackers Love You on Valentines Day

London, 11^th February 2010 - Valentine’s Day is coming up and hackers are preparing. They’re betting that consumers get weak in the knees with the mention of the ‘L’ word.

A decade ago, the I LOVE YOU virus (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/736080.stm) spread from one machine to another since few consumers used protection. A decade later, “iloveyou” is the fifth most common password (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/technology/21password.html), “lovely” is number 18 and “loveu” is 23 and “loveme” is 43.

This year, hackers will likely concoct a special Valentine potion that uses the promise of being secretly admired combined with our prevailing addiction to sharing personal information on social networks like Facebook. How will it work?

First, hackers easily get a complete list of friends for many users. Then, hackers send to that certain someone a Valentine messages seemingly coming from a friend. Urged to click a Valentine’s Card to retrieve virtual chocolates or roses, you, uh, end up with a virus.

Amichai Shulman, CTO of Imperva, says “The success of such a campaign is in numbers. For this, the hacker adds a key ingredient – automation. Using an automated tool, the hacker scrapes friends list from Facebook as well as turns them into a phishing mail, all in a single click of the mouse, to spread their virus.”

Shulman continues “What can you do? First, look up who sent you the Valentine’s greeting and make sure it’s legitimate. Chances are your 5^th grade teacher did not and still does not have a crush on you. Chances are your football coach really isn’t into that mushy-mushy stuff. Chances are your neighbor isn’t suddenly into knowing you intimately.” 

Amichai requests to lovers to take to heart these recommendations:

·         Do not follow links or download software referencing unsolicited spam.

·         Update your computer with the latest patches.

·         Ensure your anti-virus is enabled and up-to-date.

·         If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.  Nothing bad will happen if you simply hit ‘delete.’

ENDS

About Imperva

Imperva, the Data Security leader, enables a complete security lifecycle for business databases and the applications that use them. More than 4,500 of the world’s leading enterprises, government organisations, and managed service providers rely on Imperva to prevent sensitive data theft, protect against data breaches, secure applications, and ensure data confidentiality. The award-winning Imperva SecureSphere is the only solution that delivers full activity monitoring from the database to the accountable application user and is recognised for its overall ease of management and deployment. For more information, visit www.imperva.com.