Internet Security and Programming

You might want to think twice before opening that e-greeting card sent to you via e-mail. Cyber crooks have recently been blasting out millions of fake online greeting cards in the hope that recipients will click on the included links and infect their computers with password-stealing viruses. Previous e-greeting card scams harbored their viral payload in an infected e-mail attachment, but fraudsters now are simply embedding links in the fake card messages. Anyone who clicks on such a link without the benefit of the most recent security updates for their Web browser is likely to have their PC silently whacked with an invasive keystroke-logging program. I’ve seen heightened warnings about these scams over the past several weeks, but only recently checked the virus log included in our Postini e-mail inbox filter here at washingtonpost.com. Every single virus quarantined over the past five days was one of these e-greeting card [...]

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