Yahoo! accused of hosting thousands of phishing sites

Yahoo! is hosting thousands of fraudulent websites that have domain names containing the words "bank", "PayPal" or "eBay", according to a leading anti-spam group Spamhaus.

Spamhaus claims Yahoo! is hosting almost 5,000 domain names using these words, many of which are linked to phishing 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, which shows that the situation is out of control."

Spamhaus, a non-profit organisation, currently has around 20 entries relating to Yahoo! on its block list SBL.

Cox said that Spamhaus had written to Yahoo! about a number of cases, but received no replies.

"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. Responsible organisations will pro-actively check for any domain they are hosting that have an obvious fraudulent intent and will remove any they find, or any reported by other network users."

Cox said 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.