<div>The year has started with a bumper crop of online frauds, cons, ID thefts, and check stealing this year. Some of them can steal your returns, others cost you your life savings or money you have not even begun to earn.<br /> <br /><strong>Valentine's Day Spam:</strong> Valentine's Day represents one of the big shopping periods of the year. Online shoppers will be seen expressing their love this week as both online retailers and spammers continue to take steps to attract and convert shoppers. This year, Symantec has observed that Valentine's Day spam messages offer unbelievable discounts on jewellery, dinning opportunities, and expensive gifts to shoppers. The top word combinations used in spam messages includes: Find-Your-Valentine; eCards-for-Valentine; Valentine's-Day-Flowers. The e-card spam message arrives with a malicious attachment called ValentineCard4you.zip. After opening the attachment, malware is downloaded on to the user's computer. <br /><br />The attachment has been detected as Backdoor.Trojan whose primary functionality is to enable a remote attacker to have access to or send commands to a compromised computer. <br /> <br /><strong>Income Tax Filing Return:</strong> Phishing emails boasting of tax refunds were sent to users in an attempt to entice citizens to enter their credentials on a bogus website. Recently, new attacks have been observed in which the phishing website states that taxes can be paid online. As the fiscal year in India draws to an end, more people are rushing to pay taxes before the deadline. The phishing website has mimicked the legitimate one in order to steal customers' sensitive information. However, the phishing page is not SSL encrypted-the legitimate page is.<br /><br /><strong>Increased Phishing On Indian Brands:</strong> In the month of January, the number of phishing URLs associated to Indian brands accounted for 0.15 per cent of the global phishing statistics which were all in the banking sector. Mumbai tops the list of cities that hosted phishing sites in India of non-Indian brands followed by New Delhi. Hyderabad and Aurangabad were on the 3rd and 4th place respectively. <br /><br /> "The sheer volume of public involvement in topical events makes them rewarding opportunities for cyber criminals. Spammers find new ways to get unsuspecting users to download malicious content, buy fake products, open attachments and fall for event driven scams," says Abhijit Limaye, Director, Development, Security Response at Symantec while advising users to be cautious when handling unsolicited discount offers or suspicious emails or URLs that seek personal information.</div>
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