Spammers fool filters with SkyDrive

 

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By Matthew Sparkes

Posted on 9 Jan 2008 at 11:13

Spammers are using Microsoft's SkyDrive file hosting service to fool spam filters, according to McAfee researchers.

Spammers are uploading HTML files to SkyDrive which redirect to external sites, and linking to them from within spam emails. The advantage to this approach is that Microsoft's servers are unlikely to be blacklisted by spam filters.

"Our labs trapped many thousands of spam [messages] overnight that are abusing the Windows Live SkyDrive Beta service. The payload is an HTML file with just one line of HTML at the moment, that redirects your browser," says McAfee security researcher, Chris Barton, in a blog post.

"The number of times we trapped each URL was interestingly low for such a big campaign, I'd therefore estimate they had tens of thousands of files uploaded. I'm sure it won't be too long before it's used to host other unwelcome content types," says Barton, before explaining that he would like to see online file hosting services scan for malware.

Microsoft launched SkyDrive, a rebranded version of Live Folders, in August last year. McAfee claims that it has been aware of similar tactics since November last year, but that it has never witnessed it on such a large scale until recently.

Microsoft has been unavailable for comment, and it is not clear if it is aware of the problem.