Spammer shut down!

Junk e-mail drops after major spammer shut down
Star news services

The volume of junk e-mail sent worldwide plummeted Tuesday after a Web hosting firm that engaged in spam activity was taken offline, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.

McColo Corp., according to The Post, was a Web hosting business with customers made up of “some of the most disreputable cyber-criminal gangs in business today.”

The San Jose business was reported to be responsible for more than 75 percent of the world’s junk e-mail each day.

According to The Post’s Brian Krebs, two of McColo’s main Internet providers shut it down after his blog “Security Fix” reported the spam activities.

“Security Fix” said it studied the company for four months before making the report.

According to Krebs’ article: “While its gleaming, state-of-the-art, 30-story office tower in downtown San Jose, Calif., hardly looks like the staging ground for what could be called a full-scale cyber-crime offensive, security experts have found that a relatively small firm at that location is home to servers that serve as a gateway for a significant portion of the world’s junk e-mail.

“The servers are operated by McColo Corp., which these experts say has emerged as a major U.S. hosting service for international firms and syndicates that are involved in everything from the remote management of millions of compromised computers to the sale of counterfeit pharmaceuticals and designer goods, fake security products and child pornography via e-mail.

But the company’s Web site was not accessible Wednesday, when two Internet providers cut off MoColo’s connectivity to the Internet, security experts said. Immediately after McColo was unplugged, security companies charted a precipitous 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 watchdog, found a similar decline, from about 40 spam e-mails per second to about 10 per second.

“Officials from McColo did not respond to multiple e-mails, phone calls (or) instant messages. It’s not clear what, if anything, U.S. law enforcement is doing about McColo’s alleged involvement in the delivery of spam.