Spam Hosting Company Taken Down

According to reports, the volume of junk e-mail sent worldwide dropped drastically today after a Web hosting firm identified by the computer security community as a major host of organizations allegedly engaged in spam activity was taken offline.

The company, McColo Corp is located in a 30 story office tower in downtown San Jose, Calif.

Security experts have found that McColo is home to servers that serve as a gateway for a significant portion of the world’s junk e-mail.

Two Internet providers cut off MoColo’s connectivity to the Internet, security experts said.

Immediately after McColo was unplugged, ssecurity companies noticed a huge drop in spam volumes worldwide.

E-mail security firm IronPort said spam levels fell by roughly 66 percent as of Tuesday evening.

Spamcop.net, another spam watch dog, found a similar decline, from about 40 spam e-mails per second to around 10 per second.

Also unclear is the extent to which McColo could be held legally responsible for the activities of the clients for whom it provides hosting services. There is no evidence that McColo has been charged with any crime, and these activities may not violate the law.

Mark Rasch, a former cyber crime prosecutor for the Justice Department and managing director of FTI Consulting in Washington, D.C.,. said Web hosting providers are generally not liable for illegal activity carried out on their networks, except in cases involving copyright violations and child pornography.

In the case of child pornography, providers may be held criminally liable if they know about but do nothing to eliminate such content from their servers.

We applaud this action.

I generally get 500+ spam’s a day and at least once a month a day with 5K+ spam.

Additional we are victimized daily bu having one or more of our domains used as a fake header or return address for spam or as a removal link.

We also regularly have our corporate and personal e-mails used as fake senders and as the return address for spam sent by others.

Of course how long will it take for the clients of this company to find another place somewhere in the world to host this crap and resume the e-mail attacks?