Picasa Web Albums is the latest of Google's hosted services to be exploited by spammers while Adobe Flash redirection techniques are also being abused by spammers to host Flash-based .SWF, Shockwave Flash, files that cause Web browsers to re-direct to the spammer's site.

"Over the course of this year, spammers have been highly focused on using as many of Google's free, hosted services as possible to distribute spam," says Mark Sunner, Chief Security Analyst of MessageLabs. "Not only are the links contained within the spam emails difficult for traditional anti-spam filters to detect as they appear to be legitimate URLs, but it is also much more unlikely such filters will block emails based on the URLs they contain without causing significant collateral damage."

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Related topics: Email, Security, Spam