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Washington Post Blog Shuts Down 75% of Online Spam
ESCquire writes "Apparently, the Washington Post Blog 'Security Fix' managed to shut down McColo, a US-based hosting provider facilitating more than 75 percent of global spam. " Now how long before the void is filled by another ISP?
The badness attributed to McColo was not limited to spam. It included child pornography sites; sites that accepted payment for spam and child porn; rogue anti-virus Web sites; and a huge malicious software operation that apparently stole banking and credit card data from more than a half million people worldwide.
And they operated for how long before they were shut down ... as a United States based hosting provider?
... I'm all for user privacy policy from an ISP but obviously these people are criminals.
If they have evidence of these things, I certainly hope that The Washington Post turns any evidence over to the FBI or at the least the local law enforcement where McColo is operating. And I hope a warrant is obtained through the appropriate channels to collect evidence from Hurricane Electric & Global Crossing
My work here is dung.
When it comes to these sorts of things, oft times law enforcement and intelligence agencies who know about a source of major operations DON"T shut them down, so as to build a case against the bigger players or to maintain the ability to track what is going on. Given that this is a US-based corporation with US-based servers, I wonder if this shutdown has seriously compromised on-going monitoring and criminal cases. While this has almost certainly seriously disrupted operations of the various bad guys for now, I would give it only a few days before they're back online based at overseas locations where they're less easily reachable. Except for some script kiddies, the operations are all sophisticated enough to use standard techniques such as multiple hardcoded fallback IPs. DNS redirection, and using fake BGP announcements to hijack IP blocks to get back online.
--Paul