Hooray! Spammer Hosting Company Snuffed Out!

Every once in a while, the good guys win one.  Someone puts “what is right” before “what is profitable” and makes a decision for the greater good of us all.  On Tuesday November 11th, a internet hosting company called McColo in San Jose, CA, disappeared into thin air.   Along with them, when thousands of spam and phishing schemes.  Brian Krebs, a reporter for the Washington Post, had been on them like a rabid dog on a raw steak.   He explained that the company had been under investigation for a while now, and it’s data had been collected and scrutinized by a team of investigators.   They had found that McColo, had been responsible for about 75% of all spam sent in the United States!

Security expert estimate that McColo must have gone offline at about Tuesday, 9am EST and continued day in-day out monitoring of spam has seen about a 50% drop in spam, beginning Wednesday morning.   It is speculated that these spammers may resurface in Eastern Europe next year.  This is the second triumph in recent years against spammers.   The people directly responsible for putting them out of business have been the upstream providers of the internet service.