Less Spam Today? Thank Global Crossing and Hurricane Internet

The good guys on the Internet finally convinced Hurricane Internet and Global Crossing to terminate their connections to McColo, home of all kinds of Internet bad guys: spammers, child pornographers, fake pharmaceutical salesmen, botnet management, fake security products, etc.

The most visible result is that global spam volumes have dropped to less than half of what they were before McColo was shut down. Hooray! Now, this will all be pretty temporary, as the spammers move to new hosting or McColo finds a new, shadier company willing to take their money for Internet connectivitiy.

From the Washington Post blog post:

Nilesh Bhandari, product manager with IronPort, said the company sees an average of about 190 billion spam e-mails each day. Then, at around 4:30 p.m. ET yesterday, IronPort saw a huge decline in spam levels. For the 24 hour period ending Tuesday, the company tracked about 112 billion spam messages.

Of course, Global Crossing and Hurricane Internet shouldn’t get too much credit. McColo has been pretty evil for years, and endless complaints have had no effect. It was only after the Washington Post got involved and did their own investigation, and then presented them with way more proof than they could ignore, did the ISPs take action. Why the FBI or anyone else official hadn’t done something similar remains a mystery.

And this doesn’t actually shut down the machines that were sending the spam, which are generally poorly secured Windows machines in peoples’ homes. It’s just that their control servers can’t reach those Windows machines any longer to give them instructions and spam to send, so they’re just sitting there waiting for instructions. The people who run the spam nets are annoyed, because their command and control servers are down, but the bad guys are still OK and their botnets are still OK. Once they set up a new server, they should be right back in the spamming game. The IronPort guy agrees:

Bhandari said he expects the spam volume to recover to normal levels in about a week, as the spam operations that were previously hosted at McColo move to a new home.

“We’re seeing a slow recovery,” Bhandari. “We fully expect this to recover completely, and to go into the highest ever spam period during the upcoming holiday season.”

But, for now, yay! Obama wins and then spam drops by 65% one week later! We’re already getting the change he promised! Next I expect complementary donuts delivered to all households every Monday morning. Get on that!