Apparent spam host taken offline

2008-11-13T09:53:18-05:00

McColo, a web hosting company, was taken offline by its network peer, Hosting Electric, after reports by Jart Armin of HostExploit and Brian Krebs of the Washington Post implicated McColo as a major host of spam.

As you can see, there has been a significant drop in spam reported to SpamCop since McColo was taken down. While likely temporary, it does indicate that the reports were accurate in their assessment.

Even as I applaud the efforts of journalists and security researchers to cut off spammers and malware purveyors at the source, I wonder about who else is negatively affected by these takedowns. Surely McColo and previously-taken-down Intercage had legitimate customers, owners of websites and/or domain names that they used for their personal blogs, their small businesses, their family photo albums, and so on. What happened to those users when their providers and their sites suddenly became unavailable? This doesn’t necessarily make it wrong to shut down the providers, as the disease (spam, malware, etc., affecting potentially millions of people) is almost certainly worse than the cure. But it does raise the question of whether we can find ways to hit the bad guys where it hurts, without also hurting innocent bystanders.

If you have thoughts on this, please let us know in the comments.

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Apparent spam host taken offline