Four weeks after McColo takedown, spam back to 63% of earlier volume
December 9, 2008 (Computerworld) Four weeks after spam levels plummeted when a rogue hosting company was yanked off the Internet, junk mail volumes are again up, a researcher said today.
According to IronPort Systems Inc., spam volumes have partially recovered since the Nov. 11 takedown of McColo Corp., the California hosting firm that was pulled off the Web by its upstream service providers after security researchers presented them with overwhelming evidence that it was harboring a wide range of criminal activity. Among McColo's clients: cybercriminal groups that ran some of the biggest spam-spewing and malware-spreading botnets in the world.
Yesterday, approximately 94.6 billion spam messages were sent worldwide, said IronPort, which estimated today's volume at 96.8 billion. Those numbers were 62% and 63%, respectively, of the 153 billion spam messages sent four weeks ago, the day McColo went offline.
Immediately after the takedown, spam levels dropped to 64.1 billion, just 42% of the pre-McColo volume.
Spam's resurgence comes courtesy of several botnets -- some well-known, some not -- that were largely unaffected by McColo's disappearance, said Joe Stewart, director of malware research at SecureWorks Inc.
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