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Microsoft's Windows Live SkyDrive service has become a hotbed of spam enabling, as criminals seek buyers for their pharmaceuticals.

Put a free service on the Internet, and someone will try to take advantage of it. The same thing happens in the physical world, of course, and even in cartoons.

SkyDrive drew lots of unwanted attention from spammers engaged in the usual drug-selling schemes, according to security vendor McAfee. Spams containing an HTML file linked to SkyDrive, and then redirected to the drug site.

Several features, like unique URLs, a blacklist-proof domain, and a price of free make it appealing to criminals. Though McAfee had seen SkyDrive abused before, this latest campaign took on a much larger scale.

"The number of times we trapped each URL was interestingly low for such a big campaign," said Chris Barton at the Avert Blog. "I’d therefore estimate (SkyDrive) had tens of thousands of files uploaded."

Barton thinks SkyDrive and similar services could become unwitting malware hosts next. "I’d like to see more of these online file storage offerings malware scanning downloads too."