THE DEATH OF INTERNET SPAM HAS BEEN CONFIRMED

// November 15th, 2008 // Hott Articles

we can check our email safely again

“US Internet security experts have struck a major blow against junk email purveyors”

By John Charles Reedburg

Too bad for the spammers. But – yay! For us.

SPAM has been with us since the earliest days of the Internet, and is now an accepted annoyance of being online, along with pop-up ads and your aunt forwarding you chain emails. But it seems that US Internet security experts have struck a major blow against junk email purveyors, shutting down a hosting company they claim was responsible for up to 75 percent of worldwide spam.

The company is McCOLO, an Internet Service Provider. When their upstream provider Hurricane Electric cut off their access to the series of tubes known as the Internet, those that track these sort of things noticed huge drops in the level of spam being sent out. IronPort, an e-mail security firm, said levels fell by roughly 66 percent as of Tuesday evening, while Spamcop.net reported that spam fell from 40 spam e-mails per second to 10 per second.

McColo, whose corporate website is down for the moment, seems to be out of the spam game. Still, this doesn’t mean the end of emails with titles like “ch4eP C!@lis” and “STAATSLOTTERIJ INTERNATION NET AWARD !!” In an article in the the Washington Post, spam experts are worried shutting down McColo could actually make things even more difficult:

Joe Stewart, director of malware research for SecureWorks, said botnets such as “Mega-D” or “Srizbi,” which are known to send e-mails about access to prescription drugs, have had their master servers hosted at McColo.

Although security experts who have been seeking to stop McColo from allegedly hosting questionable sites are pleased to see the company lose its access, some are worried that it will only make it harder to track illegal activity.

“Everything will just be more spread out and harder to mitigate,” Stewart said. “We rather like knowing where the bad activity is coming from, so protecting our networks is easier.”

So don’t worry — someone out there will still be willing to help you “Turn you stick to a skyscraper!!”*