eBuzz

Getting Serious About Spam

According to a story in the Washington Post, the company producing 75% of the spam received worldwide was effectively put out of business today:

The gleaming, state-of-the-art, 30-story office tower in downtow The servers are owned by McColo Corp, a Web hosting company that has emerged as a major U.S. base of operations for a host of international cyber-crime syndicates, involved in everything from the remote management of millions of compromised PCs to the sale of counterfeit pharmaceuticals and designer goods, fake security products and child pornography.

Multiple security researchers have recently published data naming McColo as a mother ship for all of the top robot networks or "botnets," which are vast collections of hacked computers that are networked together to blast out spam or attack others online.

It's not clear what, if anything, U.S. law enforcement is doing about the alleged activity at McColo. An FBI spokesman declined to offer a comment for this story. The U.S. Secret Service could not be immediately reached for comment.

While the government may not be doing anything, the two major internet providers for McColo closed operations on the company, one of them — Hurricane Electric — in no uncertain terms: "We shut them down," Ng said. "We looked into it a bit, saw the size and scope of the problem [washingtonpost.com was] reporting and said 'Holy cow!' Within the hour we had terminated all of our connections to them."

While it seems clear that McColo will live on, eventually, somewhere else, it's good to see the internet community working together to police itself and improve deliverability of legal email communications.

... and that's our take on the news today!