Phishers, scammers and other attackers love free hosting services. They constantly need to set up plenty of malicious sites as their old ones are taken down or blacklisted. Fake AV authors loved co.cc, a free DNS service that allows them to redirect users to sites such as flashupdate.co.cc. They then used a similar service from cz.cc, etc. . .co.tv was used to redirect users to malware. Free hosting service Ripway is still full of phishing sites.
The ultimate dream of a phisher it to be able to set up thousands of phishing sites freely, anonymously, and quickly. Luckily for them, PasteHtml.com offers a service which empowers them to do just that. It is a “Free anonymous web hosting” site, which allows anyone to create any page with a simple POST request.
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| PasteHtml.com home page |
To be clear, like many other free services, PasteHtml was not designed to host malicious content. They have many legitimate pages, but they are also used to host many Phishing pages. Try searches on the site for terms such as “site:pastehtml.com facebook login” or “site:pastehtml.com paypal“, Most of the pages are malicious.
PasteHtml seems to take phishing seriously. A lot of these phishing pages were taken down, and warnings are shown for potentially dangerous pages (see hxxp://pastehtml.com/view/1b3tqp1.html).
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| Warning from PasteHtml |
Here are a some of the phishing/spam/scam pages I’ve found that are not (yet) blocked:
- Facebook: hxxp://pastehtml.com/view/awq68wgzy.html (update: now blocked)
- Zynga: hxxp://pastehtml.com/view/1ehc16p.html
- Pharma spam: hxxp://pastehtml.com/view/1d7xdbx.html (there are many similar pages)
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| Facebook phishing page |
It is so easy, and so quick, to create new malicious pages using services such as PasteHtml, that even their intentions may be good, they are bound to be vastly abused.
— Julien
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