Latest Hacker Havens: Free Hosting and Free Subdomains

Competition for internet advertising dollars has encouraged many companies to offer free subdomains to those who might provide enough content to produce a few clicks on the affiliate marketing banner ads and other advertisements generally required as part of these free services. Not a bad deal. But, there is a more ominous side to free hosting and free subdomain services. Free hosting services are becoming havens for hackers, spammers, cross-site scripting agents and other forms of malicious or criminal behavior.

On any given day I monitor 50-500 hack attempts made possible through these free service websites. I am not suggesting that the sites themselves are willing participants or are even aware their sites and servers are being used as tools by criminal cyber-gangs or malicious individuals. But I do believe they share some responsibility for scripts being placed on their servers.

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I'd like to know your thoughts.

 

Block the offending content

 

Those techniques may help the casual web surfer but they don't protect the website from variable hijacking.

But I digress. I'd like to know your thoughts on free hosting services as they relate to malicious scripts.

 

Yep, they're client-side techniques to protect the web surfer.

Sorry, I know very little about hosting services. I'd guess that those free hosting services have lazy admins whom care very little about security. Unpatched software, weak settings, slowness to check the content hosted, etc may be common things on these sites.