Gladiator Research and Security

The amount of spam on the Internet has decreased considerably during the last week.  All signs are pointing to the takedown of McColo Corp, a US-based service provider notorious for housing spam and malware providers, as the probable reason.  Multiple articles have been written debating the pros and cons of taking down an entire service provider (some are linked below), but I think we can all agree that the reduction in spam is a welcome sight.  Gladiator’s eShield service has detected a remarkable decrease in spam of over 60% recently.  The graph below indicates our spam counts for the last month:

[Chart Updated Nov 18, 2008]

As you can see, we’ve gone from a steady count of 600,000 to 700,000 spam emails per day down to less than 200,000 in mid-November.  Not only is this decrease good for everyone’s mailboxes, it also takes down a bandwidth hog.  Unfortunately, experts are predicting that the drop in spam is only temporary, and will likely spike back up once the spam-sending botnets find a new home.  Hopefully, service providers out there are starting to realize the consequences of turning a blind eye to malware providers on their network and will start screening their customers a bit more carefully.

Related Links:

• SANS ISC Article (http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=5333)
• Washington Post Article (http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2008/11/major_source_of_online_scams_a.html)
• Security Focus Article (http://www.securityfocus.com/brief/855)