McColo hosting company was cut off due to distribution of spam and child porn

Have you noticed that you e-mail box is not bursting with junk messages any more? And you don’t spend your precious time for deleting those unnecessary messages? You think that your spam filters work better? Or phishers got retired? May be they forgot your e-mail? NO! The answer is simpler. The thing is that this week two major ISPs have cut off internet access to the US-based hosting company McColo Corp.

50-75% of all spam in the world was sent through McColo

The main reason for the cut off that McColo was hosting the command and control systems for a number of major botnets, including Rustock, Srizbi, Dedler, Storm, Mega-D and Pushdo. According to the Security Fix’s investigation results 50-75% of all spam in the world was sent through McColo. In addition to spam this devil’s company served child pornography, rogue anti-virus sites, malware, and stolen credit card information.

SpamCop.net decided to check the real influence of McColo on the Internet community and conducted a small investigation. The results were really eloquent. According to the results the amount of spam in the past 24 hours averages out to 11.9 messages per second. And a month ago the figure was different - 30.1 messages per second.

"It appears that so far that the McColo shutdown has had a pretty significant effect on spam output," commented Sam Masiello, VP of information security at MX Logic.

However, we shouldn’t delude ourselves as all of us remember the time when another spam-giant Intercage, Californian web hosting service Intercage has been shut down. That time spam levels dropped by nearly 10 per cent however the holiday didn’t last long and very soon the “balance” was restored. 

More detailed information will be available in the coming issue. Keep updated!