Major SPAM Distributor Taken Down by Feds

Have you noticed a drop in the amount spam being delivered to you recently? If so, this may be due to the fact that one of the largest SPAM firms was taken offline. McColo Corp, based out of San Jose, California was hosting servers by a relatively small firm that served (no pun intended) as a means to deliver a significant amount of the world's SPAM. McColo's client list doesn't hold up as far as integrity goes. Their 'clients' include companies that sell knock off pharmaceuticals & handbags as well as child porn -- all via email.

As soon as their site and servers were pulled, spam volumes dropped worldwide -- as much as 66 percent in some cases. Spamcop, the absolute authority on SPAM, saw 40 spam emails per second drop down to 10 per second. The graph can be found below:



McColo's fate is not ultimately sealed, but it seems as though they're S.O.L. Mark Rasch, a former cyber-crime prosecutor for the Justice Department claims that "It's a little bit like a landlord who owns a building and sees people coming in and out of the apartment complex constantly at all hours and not suspecting their may be drug activity going on." Sure, they can play dumb all they want, but they more than likely knew of the fishy behavior occurring through their servers.

This is a major score for all of us legit email senders as well as anyone who is inundated with irrelevant, spammy email.

You can read the entire story at msnbc.com. It's worth the read. Thanks to Greg Cangialosi for pointing this out.