… a ragtag band of researchers pulled off the unprecedented coup of drastically cutting the spam volume by adopting a new strategy: going after mainstream U.S. companies that can unknowingly help spammers, identity thieves and child porn purveyors by carrying their traffic on the Internet.
The result:
Two big providers of Internet connections named in it — Hurricane Electric Internet Services and Global Crossing Ltd. — acted quickly to cut ties to the core subject of the document, a little-known Silicon Valley company called McColo Corp. that rents out servers to clients.
And the site is still down. The researchers – and their report – can be found here. Brian Krebs of the Washington Post has been all over this story. In his latest post, he cites Joe Stewart, the director of malware research for Atlanta-based SecureWorks, who says that the IPs assigned to McColo were “responsible for sending more than 75 percent of the world’s spam on any given day.”
Despite having spam filters at the server level and on my desktop, I still get way too much spam. But today, it was lighter than normal. I appreciate the effort on the part of that “ragtag band of researchers” to reduce what has become a real headache.
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