Late this week, I heard from several anti-spam activists who alerted me to a nice reminder that spammers don’t always win: Spammers have been promoting their rogue pharmacy sites via images uploaded to free image hosting service imageshack.us. In response, the company appears to have simply replaced those images with the following subtle warning:
The spammers' images were replaced with scam warnings like this one.
Imageshack did not respond to a request for comment sent Thursday.
Update, Feb. 13, 3:20 a.m. ET: I heard from Imageshack co-founder Alexander Levin, who said the image swaps aren’t automated. “We need a source to provide us with image links to replace. Thankfully, we found one using a honey pot,” Levin wrote in an e-mail. “With some rudimentary analysis we were able to find over 300 images uploaded to our services in this way, and were able to replace them with this image within an hour of them being reported.”