Bugwatch: The aftermath of Valentine's Day

This week Greg Olson, executive vice president of Sendmail, explains the challenges that come with handling Valentine's Day spam.

Valentine's Day may be a joy for those who are romantic at heart but it's a nightmare for network managers.

Now that the date has come and gone, IT departments around the country will have breathed a collective sigh of relief that they have escaped unscathed from the spectre of rogue email spam.

With 45 billion messages sent globally in just one day, the threat of receiving a Valentine's Day virus was always high on this list of probabilities.

But the best action IT managers and email users can take now is to remain vigilant for any delayed Valentine's Day spam scams.

This is because the period leading up to and following Valentine's Day represents every hacker's dream. For them, it triggers a prime opportunity in which to launch viruses and worms masked as a legitimate messages onto an unsuspecting public.

Passing over vulnerable networks and slack email filters, the hackers not only expose technology weaknesses but succeed in causing maximum network misery.

So what can firms do to minimise the risks of succumbing to such email havoc?

As a matter of course, organisations should have a standard antivirus and anti-spam security solution in place to screen all emails at the internet gateway.

This system can be made more effective, efficient and flexible with the use of 'black' and 'white' listings, which differentiate between banned and approved email recipients. In this way, spam can be screened, managed and eradicated both at individual user level as well at the firewall.

With calendar dates of any significance, such as Valentine's Day, companies should alert staff as to the different types of email they can open and what they should avoid. Hackers are becoming smarter in their tactics and techniques and now cleverly tailor their emails for greater impact.

Email users should think twice about opening attachment-containing emails purporting to be from others they know. This also goes for emails that have been forwarded with unexpected attachments.

Strengthening personal filter levels to screen for obvious words, variations and phrases around the romantic theme - such as 'Valentine', 'sweetheart', 'love' and 'true' - will help slash the probability of a virus slipping through the system.

Global organisations, which send and receive email in multiple languages, should also have linguistic filter devices switched on in order to identify multilingual spam emails and mutant strains.

Above all, organisations should not be complacent about the risks they face in the battle against innovative spam types and methods of delivery.

Moreover, firms should seriously consider additional investment to integrate current anti-spam systems with complementary filters and associated technology.

It is this pooling of systems that will ultimately prove the most powerful way to virtually eliminate all spam, whatever its nature, regardless of when it is sent.