Major Reduction in Spam Volume

12 November, 2008

Customer impact:

TiTAN Gateway’s customers have seen a temporary drop in spam volumes. This is good news, of course, since less spam is good for our customers.

What happened?

At about 4:20 PM EST Tuesday, McColo, a U.S.-based web hosting company was shut down by their ISPs (in industry lingo “depeered” by their ISPs, i.e., they lost their ability to connect to the internet). By various ISPs depeering McColo, spam volumes have gone down across the board.

The allegations are that McColo offered web hosting services to many international cybercrime organizations. Further analysis of McColo’s IP block (the IP addresses they are responsible for), show that they were not limited to spam, but also phishing campaigns, malware distribution, and even the hosting of digital content. More information can be found here about the initial incident.

What will happen?

We are expecting the spam volume drop to be temporary. Volumes are likely to increase after a short duration. This incident highlights the volatility, gravity and far-reaching impact of the spam problem.

There are (and always have been) 2 angles to battling spam – One is through technology and the other is through methods other than filtering, such as policy, law enforcement, etc. In an ideal world both methods work together to keep inboxes clean. This is a great win for the latter approach.

We believe that the spam volume drop will be temporary, since spammers will continue to be incented to send spam, as they can send spam from anywhere in the world and through paths outside of McColo.

Just as spam volumes went up suddenly over the last 2 years, and have dropped suddenly yesterday, we will likely see a sudden increase in volumes once spammers retaliate. Spammers will switch command and control of their botnets to new sources and fire up new sites on new web hosts to both send spam and serve up spam web sites. Enterprises will continue to need email security technology to remove risk such as spam and viruses from their email infrastructure.