The Spamhaus Project, a clearinghouse for spammer and online scam information, claims almost 5,000 phishing sites reside at Yahoo.
Spamhaus CIO Richard Cox has told a gathering at a London conference that nearly 5,000 phishing sites occupy space on Yahoo servers, a Silicon.com story notes. These sites contain words like bank, PayPal, and eBay in their domain names, and exist solely for the purpose of stealing personal information from visitors.
“They are hosted on Yahoo! I just took three hot words, but there are dozens of others including misspellings. They are mostly phishing websites that we cannot control on a daily basis,” Mr. Cox said at the conference. “Whenever there is an entry on SBL, there is a mail sent to them. They never responded. But anything with ‘Barclays Bank’ in the title is for nothing other than a fraudulent purpose.”
The SBL, or Spamhaus Block List, contains a continually updated list of IP addresses verified as spam senders. In turn, mail servers can use the SBL to detect whether incoming messages match entries on the list, and dump them instead of forwarding them to recipients. Millions of junk messages get rejected this way each day.
A Yahoo alliance director on hand for the same conference, Nick Hazell, told ZDNet UK: “We take security very seriously and will be investigating this issue fully.”
In the US, $367 million was lost to phishing scams in 2004, according to a Javelin Strategy & Research report. 1.7 percent of the 9.3 million cases of identity fraud were phishing victims.
David Utter is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
