Spammers look east after McColo shutdown One week after rogue ISP McColo was shut down spam levels have yet to return to normality. But security experts are under no illusions that this represents anything more than a temporary reprieve, which will probably come accompanied by a change in tactics by spammers. The volume of spam in circulation fell by as much as two …
Cut off Russia and China from the wider internet, with immediate effect.
Hopefully would kick up enough of a stink that the authorities in said countries will fulfil their obligations as responsible human beings, and take away the apparent immunity that spammers and scammers enjoy there.
Cloudmark are idiots, and want to downplay a victorious assault against their whole business model.
Anyone with half a connection to a net-facing mailserver has seen the effect the shutdown had, we dropped 50 million blocked mails a week instantly.
The mere fact that this crappy little firm is trying to shout that the sky is still falling, so please buy our umbrellas, leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.
It did earlier last week / this; but already my spam levels are on the up again. Shortly after the takedown it dropped to about 10/20 a day from a previous 90+. Now it is already back up to around 40/day. Trouble is, that so long as idiotic people will respond to the ads and hand over money and details, there's a reason for greedy, moral-less twatdanglers to engage in it :(
McColo was foolish to go back on line and transfer the control data to Russia. Far better would have been to use the old "station wagon filled with mag tapes" method. Yes, it's a little slower, but it does have the advantage of leaving no footprint on the net. Now, of course, we know what they've done, and possibly who the recipients were and we can watch them. If they'd shipped the data by tape, we'd have had no clue what they'd done, or who'd gotten the data. Instead, we'd be dislocating out shoulders patting ourselves on the back about the way we'd shut them down completely right up to the moment they came back on line. Just more proof, if such is needed, that when you come down to it, spammers really are stupid.
"If we can keep spammers off low-cost, high-bandwidth US colo providers and force them offshore this will increase their costs and hopefully make it much harder for them to spam," said MessageLabs' Sergeant."
Is it just me or the above statement really sounds more-than-mildly stupid? Are there no cheap providers outside the US? Or does this guy think that the intarwub gnomes charge by the distance? Or is it just some self-serving spin?
An associate of mine is postmaster at a major customer of Cloudmark. He reported that his reported spam metric did not waiver, nor did his perceived legitimate traffic (unblocked and unreported). Blocked spam, of course, plummeted, as the total volume plummeted.
Of course, he also uses an RBL service, but I'd expect most everyone uses those these days.
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