MessageLabs Intelligence July 2008: Spammers Use Google Sites to Host Spam

Posted on: Tuesday, 5 August 2008, 06:00 CDT MessageLabs, the leading provider of messaging and web security services to businesses worldwide, today announced the results of its MessageLabs Intelligence Report for July 2008. Analysis highlights that spammers continued the trend of abusing Google's hosted applications to host spam. Previously abused applications include Google Docs, Google Pages and Google Calendar. Google Sites allows a novice to easily create a web page composed of a string of random letters and numbers resulting in a URL that is more difficult to block using traditional signature-based anti-spam tools. "Google Sites is yet another way that spammers have programmatically defeated CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) mechanisms, a validation technique that is... [read full story]