At least two groups of would-be data thieves are attempting to infect computer users with fake electronic greeting cards for Valentine's Day, security firms said this week.

The fraudsters behind the Storm worm, which gained a great deal of media attention over the past year, created a rudimentary attack by including a Valentine's Day-oriented subject line and a link to a malicious executable file. While the attack may not convince many recipients to open the file, if they do, the program dodges some 19 of 31 security products, according to the Internet Storm Center, a network monitoring group.

A more convincing scam uses e-greeting cards that link to an American Greeting lookalike site to convince users to open a signed program called "Adobe Flash Player." Rather than the actual Flash player, the program is a data-stealing rootkit, according to security software maker Sunbelt Software. Only five of 32 anti-malware products flag the program as malicious, according to results from VirusTotal.

Surprisingly, Valentine's Day has not typically been a big focus of attacks in the past. The ILoveYou worm -- perhaps the most infamous piece of malware to make the theme of Valentine's Day its own -- did not actually start spreading until May -- May 4, 2000, to be exact -- not in February. A few other malicious programs, including the Bagle-W worm and the Yaha-K worm, use references to love or dating, antivirus firm Sophos stated in a blog post breathlessly titled "Don't fall victim to the St Valentine's Day malware massacre".

Valentine's Day, or Saint Valentine's Day, marks the deaths of at least two Catholic saints named Valentine and became connected with romantic love around the late 14th century and in the writings of the poet Geoffrey Chaucer.

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