ESET Ireland

Besides Ireland, St.Patrick’s Day is recognised and popular in many parts of the world, so it comes as no surprise that cybercriminals tag along, in order to propagate some of their spam or malware. Here’s some examples we’ve seen in recent years.

Even an innocent looking picture like this could lead to malware, as in the previous years SEO poisoning directed searches for St.Patrick’s wallpapers and screensavers to sites that hosted rogue antivirus malware. So, if you really must have a St. Patrick’s Day screensaver or wallpaper, make sure you get it from a legitimate website.

Another common threat (although slightly decreasing in the last few years) are infected St.Patricks email spam greeting cards, supposedly coming from someone you know, but carrying an infected payload or containing links to infected websites.

But a rising avenue of abuse is, of course, social media. There were cases of Twitter spam with supposed links to lyrics of Irish drinking songs, pictures and greetings. There are fake greeting links on Facebook and other social networks. But perhaps one of the more interesting approaches, showing that scammers will use any way possible to get their job done, were reports of the fake St. Patrick’s related Farmville perks last year. Thatsnonsense.com described the Farmville St Patricks Day Pot of Gold Bonus as “another subscription scam, trying to bait people with free Farmville perks that do not exist. Victims are baited into joining a group and getting their friends to join as well, providing they join expensive survey subscription scams. The group links to a recently created domain called Freefarmvillestuff.com which is suspiciously hosted on a server full of pornography sites”. Though this particular scam was active last year, Farmville scams and other fake online games content keep appearing all the time, so some extra vigilance this year can’t hurt.

But don’t let any of this spoil your St. Patrick’s Day fun. Just be a bit cautious if you encounter anything that could scam you.