E-cards may be full of worms, viruses

Think twice before opening an e-card carrying Christmas or New Year greetings. The government’s Indian Computer Emergency Response Team has warned that a dangerous malware is circulating via emails pretending to be Christmas or New Year greetings.

Malware (malicious software) is designed to infiltrate or damage a computer system without the owner’s informed consent. It includes computer viruses, worms, trojans and spyware — programming that gathers information without a computer user’s permission. These spam emails come with subject lines such as “Merry Xmas!” and “Merry Christmas card for you!” With the recession on everybody’s mind, more people might prefer e cards now to save on the cost of buying paper cards plus spending on postage.

These emails contain an url which takes the user to a website hosting malware “ecard.exe”. On going to this Web page, a file “ecard.exe” is downloaded on the visitor’s system, dubbed as “Waledac (Symantec)“.

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