Storm Worm Reappears as Malicious Valentine

A Valentine's themed outbreak of the Storm worm has been detected.

Around the world, malicious e-mail messages are being received that contain a link that directs users to a website where they can supposedly download a Valentine's card, but in fact are infected with the Storm bug. The virus mirrors the fake Christmas and New Year messages seen in previous months.

According to Greg Day, security analyst at McAfee, the virus will try to steal personal information from your PC, bring down its security defenses and use your PC to send out millions of junk emails.

"There are about 10 million PCs worldwide infected with the Storm worm. These threats have suddenly spiked from 0 percent of all spam emails to 1.5 percent and they are continuing to rise as we draw closer to Valentine's Day and more people are fooled into downloading the malicious file," he commented.

"With all the hype that surrounds Valentine's Day, it was only to be expected that they (the people behind Storm) would use a similar tactic and exploit people's eagerness to receive Valentine's cards," added Diego d'Ambra of email-security company SoftScan.