Spammers and Malware Makers Using Amazon's EC2 Cloud Computing As A Base

[mandy]

I am accustomed to receiving e-mail from Amazon.com, as I am a fiercely loyal customer who shops there quite frequently. But it took me by surprise this weekend to discover that mounds of porn spam and junk e-mail laced with computer viruses are actively being blasted from digital real estate leased to the e-commerce giant.

I wasn't the only one who spotted it. Websense Security Labs issued an alert about the spam attacks on Monday, but it didn't name Amazon as the source. The advisory rightly noted that it had discovered "a substantial number of spam messages utilizing a reliable social engineering trick." The junk mail claims to have been sent from Microsoft, and urges the recipient to install an attached security update...

full article: http://blog.washingtonpost.com/securityf...ff_my.html

more:

Over the past few weeks, I’ve increasingly heard of spam and abuse problems originating in Amazon EC2...

EC2 space is now actively blocked by Outblaze, and has been listed by Spamhaus in their PBL list. ..

full article: http://taint.org/2008/07/02/162007a.html

[regic]

If you offer any type of free hosting service (web, blog, photo, cloud computing, etc) you're going to have a problem with spammers.