Is San Jose the SPAM capital of the world?
By Ed | November 14th, 2008 | Category: Email Systems | No Comments »A Washington Post major feature that got top billing on MSNBC yesterday reports that a San Jose based Internet hosting company got a good “spamking” from the authorities and the plug pulled earlier this week. Immediately after the servers were shut down, email security firm IronPort said that spam levels fell by roughly 66 percent as of Tuesday evening, and Spamcop.net, another spam watch dog, found a similar decline, from about 40 spam e-mails per second to around 10 per second.
The servers were operated by McColo Corp. (admit it – you all thought I was going to say eBay - didn’t you?), which the experts say had emerged as a major US 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 email.
Officials from McColo did not respond to multiple contact attempts by US media and It’s apparently not clear what, if anything, U.S. law enforcement is doing about McColo’s alleged involvement in the delivery of spam. An FBI spokesman declined to offer a comment for the story. The reporter said the U.S. Secret Service could not be immediately reached for comment.
Page 2 of the Washington Post’s report has some very scary data and reveals why all webmasters should be careful about the hosting services they choose, in addition to why all computer users should never let up on security vigilance.
The third page of the news report has just plain terrifying data for you – don’t read it if you’re even partially paranoid.
If you’ve been thinking (as I have) that your spam intake is down this week, be sure to say a thank you to the reporters from the Washington Post who apparently caused the take-down of this alleged malware and child-pornography distribution centre.
Ed
