Is Google a spam-enabler?

According to the most recent statistics from Spamhaus, Google ranks as number three in the ten worst spam service ISPs. Spamhaus keeps a running list of the world’s worst spam problem networks.

Naturally, since Google email is free, it lends itself to exploitation. Microsoft had been on the Spamhaus list in recent months, but the company has made efforts to combat the problem. In the past, spammers took advantage of Microsoft’s Live.com and livefilestore.com to redirect visitors to spammy sites promoting Nigerian scams, pharmaceutical products and the other usual suspects. The spammers have since moved on to Google in a similar attack method to take advantage of Google Documents.

In this technique, the spammers host pages that redirect users to their spammy sites. The attack works quite well, since most spam filters will not see a Google link as spam. Google is reportedly working on the problem.

Fortunately, because of the nature of Google Docs, the attacks are limited, and spammers can only put links to get victims to click on a link, and go to a rogue site. It’s not possible to embed HTML or JavaScript in a Google Docs page–but it’s naturally important for visitors to understand the fundamental risk of following links from unknown emails or web pages, and to understand that just because it’s a Google page, that doesn’t mean it should be trusted. The Spamhaus ranking, which is updated daily, as of today lists Google in the number three slot, exceeded by hostfresh.com as the second-worst spam-enabler, and sistemnet.com.tr as the worst.