U.S. based hosting company McColo has had its internet connectivity cut off. Security experts around the globe allege that McColo Corp from San Jose, California has of recent times been responsible for providing hosting space and internet connectivity for more than half of the global junk email which gets sent out daily.
Brian Krebs from the Washington Post wrote articles detailing that McColo has been allowing their web servers to be used for various types of illegal activities. These activities include the sending of billions of daily junk emails and hosting the command and control of huge botnets. These botnet control servers connect to compromised zombie computers and instruct them to send out billions of daily junk emails and deploy malware.
McColo’s upstream providers were Global Crossing and Hurricane Electric, however, “were” is the key word. Upon being presented with evidence showing the types of activities that McColo was participating in, these two providers severed the connection thereby disabling the ability of spammers.
This “disconnection” of McColo’s servers instantly showed a massive decline in spam levels globally. Likely this is only a temporary decline as the spammers will move on to other hosts, but at least the next few days or weeks we can all enjoy this decrease in spam.
Here are the links to Brian Krebs original posts.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2008/11/major_source_of_online_scams_a.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/12/AR2008111200658.html?nav=hcmoduletmv
