Right on cue, Storm releases Valentine's Day Variant

Traffic that we have seen thus far in relation to this worm peaked during the 1am and 2am (mountain standard time) hours this morning and has been steadily dropping ever since, but I have a hard time believing that this trend will continue with Valentine's Day still two days away!

This new variant follows the same paradigm as the ones that we have seen previously: Subject line and message body related to the upcoming holiday and a random link which points the user to a web site where they download an executable (like valentine.exe) and get infected. Nothing new.

Some of the subject lines that we have seen in relation to this worm include:

Is Anything Beautiful As A Rose?

You're my Velentine! (note the misspelling)

You Stay In My Heart

Smiley Kiss

Sample message bodies potentially include the same text as the subject line. We've seen some variances here, but it looks like the subject line and message text are pulling from just about the same static list.

Playing on emotion and holiday themes continues to be a successful social engineering tactic for the Storm Worm gang, and will continue to be popular until such time as it ceases to be effective. As with all of the other variants, don't get hit by this Cupid's arrow. There is no love to be found here!