Who would have thought it possible, hackers using free Web hosting solutions to get evil and twisted things out and onto the Internet. This article via the folks at WWWCoder really doesn’t bring me any new news. However these numbers are a little shocking.

In the first two weeks of July 2005 alone, Websense Security Labs has discovered more than 500 incidents of free web hosting sites that were created to spread keyloggers, Trojan horse downloaders, Trojan horse droppers, and other harmful spyware and aware. Earlier this year, Websense reported that free blogging accounts were being used to harbor malcode – this trend is now expanding to any form of free web hosting site. The recently uncovered sites include those available for hosting online journals, photo albums, greeting cards, music, sports ‘fan’ pages and online scrapbooks, among many other popular purposes.

Now do you want the bad news? I bet you that the numbers are probably a lot bigger than 500, depending on how many Web hosts you are looking at. So have we seen the death of free hosting accounts? No. Right now free Web hosting is too big of a bargaining chip for Web hosting companies to just toss out with the trash. What we do need to see is better and smarter ways of dealing with the problems at hand.