McAfee Labs discover large spam campaign abusing Microsoft’s SkyDrive Beta

By Janine de Blois

Overnight Monday McAfee labs discovered a large campaign and trapped “many thousands” of spam taking advantage of Windows Live SkyDrive Beta (previously Windows Live Folders).

The idea was to redirect the user’s browser to a generic pill site. The spammers are attracted to the free 1Gb of file sharing space. It offers unique urls within a trusted domain which is unlikely to be blacklisted.

Small scale spam campaigns have struck file sharing services before, including SkyDrive, but not on as nearly as large as scale as this one. McAfee contacted SkyDrive, who has been working on the problem.

Other types of abuse are possible and online file sharing services need to take precautions. Some people will find the online abuse form , which calls for more than a simple click of the mouse, too cumbersome to fill out for each infraction they come across.

More sites need to offer malware scanning downloads and a quick click option to report abusive urls.