[SGVLUG] loverspy

[Emerson, Tom]

> -----Original Message-----
> Behalf Of matti
> 
> Anyone heard of "loverspy"?

I seem to recall hearing something about it a while ago...
 
> After reading an article in the la times,
> I was attempting to figure out how to protect
> against it.. (it attackes windows systems...)
> 
> here's part of the article - tho it doesn't
> say HOW the egreeting card installs the
> trojan. (I suspect yet another Fine result
> of windows running programs which it shouldn't..)

it's a straight trojan -- it probably even has a ".exe" extension (the mark is probably told "this is an electronic greeting card -- click here to view" or something similar) and therefore blows past the weakest link of any security system -- the user.

For some interesting tidbits, "use google" to search for loverspy -- the first few hits will be news items related to what you just posted, the next few are symantec and similar anti-virus sites proclaiming their software will clobber it, then you get some older news items from when it was first released, and eventually you start finding pages in russian... (around page 3 or 4 of the search results, actually...)

Now, for the scary coincidence: when I closed that, I found another "pop-under" had come up with the /SAME/ credit-card ad I got from about.com (though not with the same site info)  I've gotten a few pop-ups when using Google, though I generally attribute them to the site I visited as a result of the search (but in some cases I find it rather dubious that the target site would resort to pop-ups/unders, but then it could be a side effect of a banner ad "somehwere" in the chain...)