Shutdown of hosting firm kills two thirds of total spam (updated)

Brian Krebs from Security Fix is one heck of a guy (and a bit of a hero)! Well, it was actually the teamwork of the security community researching the activities of an U.S. based Web hosting firm.
Brian contacted the upstream providers with this collected evidence (Security Fix) about suspicious activity emanating from the network. After review this evidence, the providers decided to pull the plug. Officials of the webhosting company did not respond to any email or other contact points listed on the website before it was shut down.

The effect on overall spam statistics was phenomenal. About a decline of 75% in spam messages.

Graphs shows the number of messages submitted as spam along
with the number of reports consumated regarding those messages
in a 24 hour period. These numbers now reflect only a small fraction
of total spam being processed by SpamCop, but they are still representative
of the total. Source: Spamcop.net

There were several other reports and sources that confirmed this major drop as you can see in Brian's second article (Security Fix). It will be a short lived victory as the spammers are already moving their operations to new servers. But it is a sweet victory!

UPDATE: The hosting company was briefly available again but soon after, lost their connectivity again. Read the story @ Sophos blog.

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