Most Spam Came from a Single Web Hosting Firm
Experts say the precipitous drop-off in spam comes from Internet providers unplugging McColo Corp., a hosting provider in Northern California that was the home base for machines responsible for coordinating the sending of roughly 75 percent of all spam each day.
Certainly this won’t last:
Bhandari said he expects the spam volume to recover to normal levels in about a week, as the spam operations that were previously hosted at McColo move to a new home.
“We’re seeing a slow recovery,” Bhandari. “We fully expect this to recover completely, and to go into the highest ever spam period during the upcoming holiday season.”
But with all the talk of massive botnets sending spam, it’s interesting that most of it still comes from hosting services. You’d think this would make the job of detecting spam a lot easier.
EDITED TO ADD (12/13): I should clarify that this is not the site where most of the spam was sent from, but the site where most of the spam sending bots were controlled from.
Muffin • November 17, 2008 5:43 AM
“But with all the talk of massive botnets sending spam, it’s interesting that most of it still comes from hosting services.”
The spam didn’t come from McColo – it was sent by a botnet which was controlled through machines hosted there.
As the article says: “a hosting provider […] that was the home base for machines responsible for coordinating the sending of roughly 75 percent of all spam each day” (my emphasis).