Spam
emails worldwide have dropped by a whopping 70 per cent with the closure of
one web hosting firm in the U.S.
McColo.com
was shut down on Tuesday after an investigation by the Washington
Post.
The paper collected four months’ worth of data on the
firm’s activities, and then passed it on to its two service
providers, Global Crossing and Hurricane Electric, who swiftly
decided to pull the plug.
Anti-spam
firm Ironport confirmed that the single closure eradicated almost
three-quarters of the world’s junk email, but also acknowledged
this change would only be temporary.
"It
is an unprecedented drop but will be a temporary outage as the
networks move from North America to places where there is less
scrutiny," said Jason Steer, a spokesman for the company.
"Spam levels will come back to normal as we build up to
Thanksgiving and Christmas."
It’s
believed that McColo.com hosted gangs running botnets –
networks of computers taken over by criminals in order to send spam.
Botnets are considered responsible for over 90% of all spam, so it’s
perhaps unsurprising that one closure could cause such a difference.
"All
the U.S. internet peering companies are under much more scrutiny. The
authorities and the internet community have woken up to the problem,"
said Mr Steer.