Spammers are in a world of hurt
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Blog, Spam, email on
I once wrote that “Spam is annoying, resource consuming, malware driven and often offensive” and still old that opinion. There was a time a few years back when I would have said that spammers were immortal when viewed as an industry, it simply could not be stopped. Now, I would simply say that spammers are vulnerable.
In October I noted that the once King of Spam was dead as the Storm Botnet had apparently stopped producing any spam at all. Of course, having been around this business for a long time now, it was obvious that the death of one player does not equate to the death of the industry. Indeed, I warned at the time that there were “plenty of young pretenders ready to wear the junk mail crown.”
The interesting thing is how recent events have played out with it being reported just last week that the takedown of a single web hosting service thought to be responsible for enabling as much as 75 percent of the spam on the planet, meant that spam was pretty much dead in the water. Indeed, during the first 12 hours following the pulling of the McColo Corp plug spam volumes did drop dramatically. As much as 70 percent less volume being recorded by the likes of MessageLabs for example.
What is more, one week on, and spam volumes have still not returned to the same levels as before the takedown. Things really are not smiley and happy in spam-land right now. Shame.
You just cannot downplay the importance of the McColo spam factor, it hosted the command and control infrastructure for three of the world
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[…] percent of the spam being seen by one monitoring outfit. Then, just last week here at IT Pro I was ranting about how spammers were in a world of hurt courtesy of the takedown of a single web hosting service […]
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