Spam Hosting Company Goes Offline

This article just tickled me pink!

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/Notorious-Web-Hosting-Service-Linked-to-Spam-Campaigns-Goes-Offline/?kc=rss

Let me give you an example of how this affected my company.  The following are some of our recent spam statistics, starting on November 11 (which is the date the spam host was cut off) and a couple of days following it.

Date        Total Mail   Spam    % that is spam

11/11     4,429          3165    71.5
12/11     1,288          228      17.7
13/11     1,344          211      15.7

Those percentages are drastic changes.  The article estimates that the company was responsible for around 75% of the total spam worldwide, because they held control servers for several of the major spam botnets out there.   Botnets, if you don’t know, are basically a cloud of computers worldwide that are infected with a trojan, usually without the computer owner’s knowledge or consent, that basically makes the computer a zombie that accepts commands from a central location to both try infecting other computers and to send out the Viagra ads, the breast enlargements, and the other various X-rated spam emails that pretty much everyone gets from time to time.

Good riddance to them.  Oh by the way, I looked up the owner records for the domain that went offline… looks like it has a Newark, NJ address registered to it.  That ought to help some of the internet vigilantes out there!