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Spam traffic drops by up to 50%

Spam traffic drops by up to 50%

Postby Absolute-Zero » Fri Nov 14, 2008 10:49 am

Spam levels drop after plug pulled on hosting site
Robert Vamosi CNET News.com
Published: 13 Nov 2008 09:08 GMT

Internet hosting site McColo disappeared on Tuesday, and with it went thousands of pieces of spam, thanks in part to investigative work by Washington Post reporter Brian Krebs.

For about four months, security experts have been collecting data about McColo Corp a California-based web-hosting service that may have been used by by the cyber underground, according to the The Washington Post. Krebs said the McColo hosting company had been responsible for up to 75 percent of all spam spent.

Security vendor MXLogic said it was seeing about a 50 percent decline in spam volume as a result on Wednesday.

Jose Nazario of Arbor Networks, a company that monitors botnet activity, speculated that McColo vanished at around 9am Eastern time on 10 November. Botnets are frequently used to relay spam, and McColo may have hosted some of the command and control servers necessary to co-ordinate spam campaigns.

:moreat: Full Article
:source: ZDNet News
Last edited by Absolute-Zero on Fri Nov 14, 2008 10:52 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Postby Absolute-Zero » Fri Nov 14, 2008 10:52 am

I'm going to back this one up. We've definitely seem a marked drop in Spam traffic since Wednesday. To give a rough example, our SMTP server logs all incoming and outgoing SMTP traffic. The log files for Monday and Tuesday were 82 and 86 meg respectively. The log files for Wednesday and Thursday are 46 and 42 meg.

Clearly, by analysing the log file size, traffic through the server has, indeed, dropped by 50% since Tuesday.
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Postby augie » Fri Nov 14, 2008 3:59 pm

Enjoy the holoiday from spam as they'll be back up somewhere else pretty soon.:(
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Postby Absolute-Zero » Fri Nov 14, 2008 4:08 pm

augie wrote:Enjoy the holoiday from spam as they'll be back up somewhere else pretty soon.:(

Yeah, that's the sad bit!
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Postby phileysmiley » Fri Nov 14, 2008 6:55 pm

I'm still averaging one every two minutes or so in just one of my email spam folders. I got about 400 since midnite.

More are getting past my spam filters, too. I actually had more spams in my inbox today than any day that I can remember. Usually only 3 or 4 get through but there have been about 12 so far today.
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