Fergie's Tech Blog

Yahoo! -- A "Phisher-friendly" hosting domain?

So what's up with this?

A colleague alerted me to this earlier today (with permission to reprint):

My attention was drawn earlier today to yet another phishing site on Yahoo! - we're already finding extreme porn and other disreputable sites moving there now that their "abuse dept" has been dismantled and reassembled in Oregon, apparently with all staff-under-training.

But it caught my eye that SOMEBODY at Yahoo! ought to be reviewing domain names like "bankofthewestupdate.com" when they are set up on their servers, if only for reasons of due diligence ... otherwise Bank of the West might possibly have grounds for a lawsuit against Yahoo! ? Have any banks ever threatened to litigate against ISPs?

If ever there was an incident calling out to be made a test case ...

Details can be found here.

Also:

The fact that very many phishers, 419s, and spamming pornographers are flocking to Yahoo is the result of changes that Yahoo have made to their abuse processing. Also, as they run ClamAV on all mail to their "new" abuse desk in Oregon, any reports to them that contain evidence of phishing incidents are automatically rejected by the ClamAV filtering - so it is difficult to know exactly HOW Yahoo! could have been expected to take action on these cases.

(Yahoo! have been told about the situation by several respected individuals but from the reactions it seems that they do not care.)

A more interesting link can be found here.

That's very disturbing. Hmmmmm...

posted by Fergie @ 8/30/2005 05:55:00 PM