McCole Corp. Responsible for Spammers
The McCole corp. had its Internet cut off by two different ISPs and something unusual happened. Companies that track Internet spam reported the Internet spam went down by more than 50%. Companies like Spamcop.net and IronPort reported that when the McCole servers were offline that Spam e-mails went down significantly. IronPort reported that spam volumes went down by 66% on the Tuesday of the shutdown.
Security companies like these have been onto McCole for a while but it wasn’t really known what extent they were hosting spammers. McCole is apparently one of the largest hosting services for spammers, remote management of compromised computers, counterfeit pharmaceuticals and designer goods, fake security products and child pornography. From a legal stand point it’s not really known if McCole could be legally responsible for what is going on their servers. The only exception is the child pornography. If the hosting service knows about that they are required to take that off their servers and can be held legally responsible. As far as the other spam found on their servers it’s a kind of hear not evil see no evil situation.
Spammers use the McCole servers because they don’t give them a hard time about what it is they do. They also do their best to keep complaints from affecting the clients. If a complaint presents itself McCole would just move the site to a different part of their network. The question is do we really want the McCole servers shunned by all the ISPs. If they are it’s going to be harder to prevent the Spam that was on the server. At least now we know where it’s all coming from. It’s easier to prevent the spam if you know where it comes from. If the McCole servers were taken down the spammers would just go somewhere else and they would be harder to find.
Read the whole story here.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/12/AR2008111200658.html
