September 7, 2005

According to anti-spam group Spamhaus, Yahoo has apparently been accused of hosting close to 5,000 phishing Web sites that have domain names containing the words "bank", "PayPal" or "eBay".

Spamhaus claims most of these domains are linked to fraudulent website scams.

Richard Cox, CIO at Spamhaus, said: "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."

Spamhaus, a non-profit organisation, currently has 20 Yahoo! domain names on its block list SBL.

Cox said Spamhaus had written to Yahoo! on a daily basis but had no success in removing the domain names.

"Whenever there is an entry on SBL, there is a mail sent to them [Yahoo!]," he said. "They never responded. But anything with 'Barclays Bank' in the title is for nothing other than a fraudulent purpose."

Cox said other organisations including AOL and Microsoft are sweeping their networks for fraudulent domains and removing phishing websites.

Cox was speaking at a Westminster eForum on spam, scams and security, where Nick Hazell, alliance director for Yahoo, was also speaking.

Hazell was unable to confirm Cox's findings but a spokeswoman for the company said: "This is the first we have heard of it. We need to investigate this to find out if [people] are violating terms of contract. We do take Richard's allegations very seriously."

Spamhaus provides spam blocking lists for 450 million mailboxes around the world.

Source: Indian Hackers.net