US email spam giant is shut down

Last Modified: 18 Nov 2008
Source: PA News

A web firm blamed for more than half the world's email spam has been closed down in the US.

Internet companies pulled the plug on McColo, based in California's Silicon Valley, after investigators amassed a mountain of evidence that it was a junk mail hotbed.

But Doug Bowers, senior director of anti-abuse engineering firm Symantec warned: "It is always a cat-and-mouse game, and we fully expect there will be a countermove."

Companies like McColo can be difficult to take down. Authorities have to prove company officials knew crimes were being committed through their servers. Web hosting companies often argue that they do not monitor how customers use their services.

Security researchers amassed evidence on their own and confronted McColo's internet providers to get the web hosting service taken down.

McColo, which claims a Delaware mailing address and a data centre in Silicon Valley, has been on security researchers' radars for more than a year. Many spam filters blocked messages coming through McColo's service.

The FBI declined to comment. However, it appears that spam senders used McColo's service to send commands to large numbers of PCs they had hijacked.

Having that conduit is critical. Spammers use networks of compromised computers - known as "botnets," or networks of robot or zombie PCs - to amass enough computing power to send millions of messages a day. The owners of those machines typically do not know their computers are secretly being used for this purpose. But criminals need a way to communicate with these computers and a web hosting company willing to look the other way.

A big problem in tracing the web hosting companies responsible for enabling botnets is that the traffic from infected computers goes through different internet providers, so the trail goes cold fast.

McColo was apparently a choke point for the spamming industry. Some of the world's biggest botnets operated through McColo's servers, according to security researchers.

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