Technology has been a boon to us most of the time. It is meant to ease our way of living by making things simpler, faster and easier to share. E-greetings were meant to make sending special messages to loved ones, colleagues, etc., more convenient. But now, with the number of virus, worms and other malware circulating over the Internet, it has become rather unsafe to open such greetings. Malware infected systems can be sent to Data Recovery Services for recovering lost data.

Earlier, the most prominent way of a system getting infected was through e-mail attachments. The attachments sent with some mails would contain viruses or worms. These would infect the system and cause data loss. Today worms like the Valentin E and the Nuwar OL come as E-greetings! Programmers combine software engineering and social engineering to make such malware.

The Nuwar.OL sends a mail whose subject line is a romantic message, like 'A dream is a Wish', 'A Token of my love', 'Love is', etc. The mail contains a link to a website that asks you to view the greeting card sent, and opens a page that looks like a card with a romantic theme. While the user is busy with this process, the worm has entered and infected the system. Once the system is infected, it replicates itself on other systems in the network. It also sends the same kind of greeting to everyone in the contact list of the affected user. The malware uses 'rootkit tools' that make tracking it difficult.

The problem with a worm is that it creates a backdoor for the author to access your computer. A system or network affected with the Nuware.OL worm starts running exceptionally slowly. Once the author has access to your computer there is no telling what damage he/she can do to it. The data from the system can be erased, altered or lost in any other way. Since this malware is tough to detect, it is often too late by the time a user realizes that his/her system is infected. One can then always search for anti-virus which can remove the worm but the data on the system would be lost by then.

At such times if your data does not have a back-up, you should turn to a