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Spammers Love Free Stuff
David Utter
Staff Writer
2007-12-12
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Easy registrations for free accounts on website or blog hosts, and websites with poor security, provide spammers with lots of ways to try and pull in victims.
 | | Spammers Love Free Stuff |  |
Criminal spammers love to make the lives of security pros miserable, but not nearly as much as they like to profit from their activities. One can't help but think "no good deed goes unpunished" when it comes to free services like web hosting, blogging, and URL redirectors.
Security firm McAfee discussed the topic of freebies and spammers in a recent Avert Labs post. Chris Barton wrote that spammers have shifted from the once heavily-spammed GeoCities to newer services like Blogger and Google Pages:
The general idea being spammers can get 1-20+ thousand accounts a day with unique urls and point them at a handful of spammed domains that they had to pay for. It's improbable that any external party can compile a complete list of the abused accounts, report them to the host and the host engage somebody clueful 24/7 to take-down the sites in any reasonable time period to make the spammers campaign ineffective.
Spammers use the obfuscation of URL redirectors like TinyURL to hide the destination of a link from the viewer, in the hope that the person will click and go. With some attacks, that may mean an instant infection by a malware file.
Unfortunately some spammers figured out how to use legitimate services like Google to fool people. Google's "Feeling Lucky" can be co-opted to send someone to a dangerous destination, all the while looking like a perfectly safe link.
Sometimes the attacks use other legitimate but unsecured websites as a vector. A separate Avert Labs post noted pharmacy spam links being dropped onto over 150 domains around the world.
These links send the browser to a fake Canadian pharmacy, with the usual ads for ED drugs and other pharmaceuticals in place. Such scams work only with the full cooperation of the victim, which makes it difficult for security pros to protect people.
There's no such thing as a free lunch. If it looks too good to be true, it's probably untrue. We could repeat cliches all day long, but as long as people make spamming profitable by purchasing bogus products, the problem won't go away.
About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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