F-Secure reports phishing sites traced to Google's cloud servers
Reports that cybercriminals have been hosting their IT resources on Amazon's cloud systems have been around for a while, but now it appears that hackers are using the Google Docs platform, according to Mikko Hypponen, chief researcher with F-Secure.
According to Hypponen, because spreadsheets can contain a variety of functionality, even to the extent of interactive forms, it seems that cybercriminals are now hosting these on the Google Docs system.
Examples, he notes in his latest security blog, include several being hosted on spreadsheets.google.com. These are, he says, quite nasty attacks, as the phishing pages are hosted on the real Google.com, complete with a valid SSL certificate. The problem is now, adds Hypponen, how to identify a Google Docs file as a potential phishing exploit. In an example cited, he says that – initially at least – "the page obviously looks like phishing: it's hosted on the public spreadsheets.google.com server where anyone can host forms."
