Washington Post Story Convinces Service Providers To Pull The Plug On Major Spam Enabler
from the but-where-do-they-go dept
We're seeing a bunch of folks pointing out that evidence collected by the Washington Post's computer security writer, Brian Krebs, is basically responsible for getting that company kicked off the internet. Krebs is a fantastic reporter, so I don't doubt the story -- but I'm always a little skeptical of stories claiming that a huge percentage of spammers have been knocked offline. We see such stories every few months, and it never seems to have any real impact on the amount of spam out there. Just last month there was a report claiming that the world's largest spam operation was shut down, but the actual amount of spam flowing across the network did not decrease.This case is a little different, in that it didn't shut down the spammers themselves, but rather a hosting company that apparently many of the largest zombie botnets relied on. However, it seems quite likely that they'll find some other hosting company that will gladly take them on and everything will be up and running again. That's not to say it's bad that these guys get taken down -- but at some point people should realize this seems like a big game of whack-a-mole, and there may be better, more efficient ways to tackle the problem.
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Filed Under: botnets, hosting, shut down, spam, spam ring
Companies: mccolo, washington post
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Significant results so far
A 75% drop in spam. Amazing.
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I can definitely say this is the first time I've actually seen a difference, and what a big one it was. Today, I woke up to only one (1!) e-mail in my Spam folder, where I usually see 10 to 20. With that big a difference, I knew something had to be up.
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Traffic Drop
http://www.dslreports.com/r0/download/1368730~af0d17d2c90ea0591df6b6f9fb98d636/spam.gif
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This is the second time
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Re: This is the second time
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What are they?
Agreed this is whack-a-mole, but what are those better, more efficient ways? I can't think of anything practical that would work.
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But for how long
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better ways
such as....................?
personal data point: Canadian pharmacies seemed to disappeared of late.
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The Best Anti-Spam Solution
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Re: The Best Anti-Spam Solution
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Not just whack-a-mole
The ISPs and hosts are certainly the most equipped party to monitor what is happening on their own networks, they just need the proper incentives to do it.
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too bad they'll recover too soon
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Re: Not just whack-a-mole
Let's see ...
ISP's monitoring network data to prevent copyright infringment - bad.
ISP's monitoring network data to prevent spamming - good?
I fail to see how you can have it both ways.
While I hate spam as much as anyone else, ISPs should not be required to police their network to prevent illegal activity - not for any reason.
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Re: Re: Not just whack-a-mole
Well, it's actually quite simple. Copyright infringement is merely a legal issue to ISPs - there's no reason for them to care about it until people get lawyered up. Spam, on the other hand, is something with actual *effects* on them. If we could eliminate all spam in an instant, the effects on network congestion would be IMMENSE. Thus, ISPs have a good reason to police themselves and each other for spam - it's for their own survival.
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Spam
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