The closure of the San Jose hosting company McColo Corp has had an amazing effect on the level of spam world-wide. A number of sources suggest that spam has dropped by around 66% in the last week or so.

McColo Corp is alleged to have been the home to a number of command and control systems for a variety of botnets, some with more than 600,000 zombie computers under their control. Many reports also suggest that the company was hosting a variety of other nefarious web sites.

I understand two Internet Service Providers (ISPs) decided to act by effectively cutting McColo off from the Internet.

I have certainly noticed the dramatic drop off in daily spam. The amount of time spent world-wide dealing with junk email is huge and is an unwelcome drain on resources, especially as many businesses try and weather the current economic downturn.

I am quite surprised just how effective the action taken by these two ISPs has proved to be, although I doubt it will last for long. The spammers will find alternative ways to continue.

However, it does raise an interesting point about how effective this sort of action can be. Perhaps, we should look to legislate to make this kind of response much easier to take. I suspect that the amount of money saved globally by this action over the last week alone was quite staggering.

Long may the lull continue …

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