On-line Dating Security Tips for Valentine’s Day (2)

Additional e-threats that are most likely to exploit Valentine's Day are:

• graffiti and other types of spam distributed via walls, channels and other social network individual or community pages, accompanied by shortened URLs directing users towards Web sites that spread malware, such as Trojans, rogue antivirus, key loggers, etc.
• e-mail spam exploiting Valentine's Day for advertising goods and services

• e-mail attachments attempting to deliver different breeds of malware under the innocent cover of a short funny movie (which requires a special codec to be played), slide show or e-card.

Other tips for keeping computers and personal information safe:

• Do not open e-mails from unknown or distrusted sources. Many viruses spread via e-mail messages so ask for a confirmation from the sender if you are in any doubt.
• Do not open the attachments of messages with suspicious or unexpected subject lines. If you want to open them, first save them to your hard disk and scan them with an updated antivirus program.
• Delete any chain e-mails or unwanted messages. Do not forward them or reply to their senders. These kinds of messages are considered spam, because they are undesired and unsolicited and they can overload the Internet traffic.
• Update your system and applications as often as possible. Some operating systems and applications can be set to update automatically. Make full use of this feature. Failure to patch your system often enough may leave it vulnerable to threats for which fixes already exist.
• Do not copy any file if you don't know or don't trust its source. Check the source of files you download and make sure that an antimalware program has already verified the files at their source.

BitDefender also recommends (aside from not clicking spam links) the use of an integrated security solution, one that includes antimalware, antispam and firewall, as well as advanced features, such as Web filtering and Identity Protection.