Since my previous post below, I received three spam email messages that linked to malicious content using Google’s ad servers. The first time was interesting, though the next few times made me think: Is Google the only ad service that allows this?

The answer is no. I went searching the net for online ads similar to Google’s, and I found some pretty interesting results. See a pattern?

Where known — or easy to find through a whois lookup — I’ve listed the company serving the ad.

1. Google: http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/ …. &adurl=http://www.oneofthewolves.com
2. Interclick: http://a1.interclick.com/ …. click.ic?http://www.oneofthewolves.com
3. EyeWonder: http://www.eyewonderlabs.com/ …. &click=http://www.oneofthewolves.com
4. Etology.com: http://pages.etology.com/gtbclk/ …. /15/http://www.oneofthewolves.com
5. MySpace: http://desb.opt.fimserve.com/lnk/?k=Nz …. href=http://www.oneofthewolves.com
6. http://adc.brandreachsys.com/ …. &Redirect=http://www.oneofthewolves.com
7. Tacoda: http://anad.tacoda.net/ …. //REDIRURL=http://www.oneofthewolves.com
8. ReduxMedia: http://ad.reduxmedia.com/click,JiIAA …. ,,http://www.oneofthewolves.com
9. DoubleClick: http://ad.doubleclick.net/ …. fhref=http://www.oneofthewolves.com

For some reason, it seems these companies don’t care that they’ll redirect to any site on the net. Granted, sites like desb.opt.fimserve.com look like spam anyway… But Google is a household name. Shouldn’t they care?

The one condolence I had in all this was Yahoo! For reasons that you might expect, the following link results in: “This link is not authorized by Yahoo!”

http://rds.yahoo.com/_…. /**http://www.oneofthewolves.com

Woot!