New Delhi: Santa Claus in its online avatar is here and it's definitely not looking towards distributing gifts and cheer, instead this lurking malware could sneak into your computer, hack your important details, passwords and laugh all the way to the bank.

Phishing, a common phenomenon to extract bank account and credit card details has regained its vigor with this Christmas season. Phishing emails cloaked as attractive greeting cards, decorated with virtual candies, cakes, reindeers, etc. are repeatedly bombed to harvested email addresses with links to websites that steal personal details.

According to a global web security firm F-Secure, one such email requires the viewers to download a flash player and points towards a file called macromediaflashplayerupdate.exe, which is a malware. Once an unaware user downloads this program, it sits on the computers hard disk and regularly logs various sensitive information including all the keystrokes typed in by the user in a file and sends it to a hacker.

Another such file is Happy New Year...exe, which is also emailed to users. When this file is downloaded and installed onto the system it decorates the user's desktop with a nice Christmas tree and colorful stars. However, what most users don't know is that it spies on your computer, starts logging the username & passwords, and sends them to a website.

Another popular way to solicit the vital details used by hackers is to announce a user as a prize winner in the email and ask him to supply further details to avail the prize.

There are millions of lonely people out there who are ripe targets for such attacks. Playing with emotions has been a regular feature of hacking and festivals and special occasions always witness a surge in such malicious activities.

Any such defrauding attempt can be avoided by using properly updated anti-virus software and keeping an eye on all those 'offers' and 'greetings' in your email box. Any suspected spam email should be deleted and reported as spam to email provider so that the sender can be labeled as such. The right place for this lurking Santa is the spam folder in your email account, and being little vigilant could keep him there, for good.