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.

By Greg Olson at vnunet.

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