Spammers have found a way to mine free Web-hosting services for cash.
Online scammers have long used free hosting services such as Yahoo Geocities or Tripod as a way to get around e-mail filters
that might otherwise recognize their spammy Web sites. But now some enterprising spammers have begun selling each other these
free Web pages, according to security vendor McAfee.
For $25 per week a spammer will sell 50 Web-hosting accounts that can be used to redirect Web traffic to sites that normally
would be flagged.
"These 'link providers' create and maintain thousands of free hosting accounts on behalf of the spammers," wrote McAfee's
Nick Kelly in a recent posting to McAfee's Avert Labs blog.
"They know that the bigger hosts are unlikely to get blacklisted because they have so many legitimate users," he added.
Scammers also use the free Web pages to try to manipulate search engines, by making it look as if their Web sites are widely
linked, said Adam O'Donnell, senior research scientist with Cloudmark, an e-mail filtering company.
And while the free hosting providers are taking steps to shut down this abuse, they appear to be fighting a losing battle.
In late June, Cloudmark researchers were seeing about 1,500 phony URLs on any given day on one of the most abused free hosting
services (O'Donnell declined to name names). One month later, that number had jumped to 3,500.
Spammers are simply able to out-pace the hosters' security teams, O'Donnell said. "They will gain more hosts for their pages
than the company is able to take down," he said.
The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.
