Free web hosters make a fortune from phishing sites

FREE WEBb hosting outfits are making a fortune off the backs of illegal phishing sites, reports Network World.

Even if the illegal content is purged from the site, the owners of free sites are making a killing.

Network World cites the case of Scott Smith who runs a free Web hosting outfit called Ripway.com.

Smith said that until the middle of last year Ripway manually terminated phishing and spamvertising accounts as they were reported.

Since he was too slow Ripway was nulrouted a few times was was blacklisted from MySpace. But all the phished traffic that came to the site would go to an error page, on which Ripway ran banners. Some scams were pulling millions of hits a week to Ripway's service, he said.

While this drained the outfit's resources, the ad revenue was earning he outfit a fortune.

Smith was essentially an honest bloke and he created a scanner that would look through text-based user content for anything remotely resembling spam. It was a shell script that checks all accounts set up in the last few weeks. It scans every text file (including PHP, HTML, txt, JS, etc), and looks for a fairly large list of keywords, including hex-encoded and double hex-encoded scripts.

This caused the number of phishing visits to drop but his company lost $10K a month to its normal $4,000-$6,000 a month.

Smith said he had no regrets as he would rather go broke than support the scammers. While Smith needs to be applauded, it is worthwhile thinking how much bigger 'free' sites must be making.

More here.