The next time you're on a dating website, flirting with a potential new love interest, be careful how much information you give away.
That's the warning from an expert at security firm PC Tools who said that a Russian-made piece of software known as CyberLover has infiltrated many of these sites and can 'flirt' with intended victims in an attempt to extract personal information.
Information including home addresses, telephone numbers, personal photographs can then be used to compile a profile which can be sold on to criminal gangs attempting identity fraud.
"Internet users today are generally aware of the dangers of opening suspicious attachments and visiting unusual URLs, but CyberLover employs a new technique that is unheard of ? and that's what makes it particularly dangerous," said Sergei Shevchenko, senior malware analyst at PC Tools.
According to PC Tools, innocent surfers are generally convinced that they are talking to a real human rather than an automated program. CyberLover has a series of 'dialogue scenarios' with pre-programmed questions and discussion topics to draw you in.
"As a tool that can be used by hackers to conduct identity fraud, CyberLover demonstrates an unprecedented level of social engineering. It employs highly intelligent and customised dialogue to target users of social-networking systems," Shevchenko continued.
For the moment, the attacks have been limited to Russia but could potentially spread to other parts of the world.
"CyberLover has been designed as a bot that lures victims automatically, without human intervention. If it's spawned in multiple instances on multiple servers, the number of potential victims could be very substantial," said Shevchenko.
www.pctools.com
Topic: CyberLover defrauds surfers (Read 508 times)