Enjoy Less Spam in Your Inbox While It Lasts

We are having some very good news today from the anti-spam battlefield with Washington Post reporting on a significant victory in the never-ending battle which has resulted in a drastic decrease in the volume of spam worldwide. The reason is simple: earlier today a web hosting firm McColo Corp. that served as a major host of numerous spam activities was disconnected from the internet.

The servers owned by McColo hosted master servers for large bot networks sending out approximately 75% of all spam in the world via infected computers. It also hosted numerous online pharmacies sites selling male enhancement products and probably child pornography sites and tools to steal credit card information as well.

After the web hosting company was identified as providing services to various spammers and scammers alike, its internet providers simply ceased its internet access. As a result, security experts noted spam volume dropping worldwide by two thirds.

Representatives of the hosting company did not comment on the entire situation and of course for now it is quite difficult to tell if the company can be held legally responsible for the activities of its customers. In fact, there are only two cases - copyright violation and child pornography - when a web hosting provider can be held liable but only on condition that it is informed of illegal activities on its servers and still does not react properly.

Still this particular hosting provider is said to have received multiple complaints about malicious activities on its servers but the company invariably left the servers up and running despite complaints. So we probably have reasons to believe McColo was perfectly aware of problems but had certain relations with spammers that guaranteed them safety when using McColo’s services.

But unfortunately the main problem remains: McColo only served as a host for all those companies directly engaged in illegal activities using its servers. But will the clients disappear because they won’t be able to use this particular hosting provider? Of course not, they will simply move elsewhere and security experts will have plenty of new work tracking them down on other servers belonging to other companies. So enjoy this peace while it lasts as it won’t last forever.

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