SPAM volumes up despite McColo shutdown

California, November 28: Confirming the skepticisms about the McColo Corp.’s shutdown being a remarkable win over shrewd spammers, levels of spamming are on increase once again, that too only just two weeks after the spam hosting company was shutdown.

The security researchers have warned that spammers are surging online all over again, as the volume of spam rose by 37 percent of what it was before McColo’s shutdown.

After unplugging the spam hosting company on Nov. 11, the level of spamming had flattened considerably by about 80 percent. Experts however, were not carried away by the figures as they expected it to be nothing more than a temporary relief. They had warned that these spammers would look for changed strategies and this time may head towards other regions beyond United States.

Going quite similar to the experts’ predictions, Matt Sergeant, senior antispam technologist at MessageLabs, has found that spammers are now sending botnets, like "Srizbi", "Asprox", "Rustock" and "Mega-D" through different domains.

Some are connecting these robots to ISPs outside the United States making it very difficult to shut them down again. About this, Sergeant said, "The problem now is that it was a lot easier to get a U.S.-based ISP shut down than it will be to get, for example, this Estonian ISP shut down".

The experts are in action again, they have increased the costs of spam hosting, hoping to throw some spammers out of the business. The matter would also to be taken to the U.S. law enforcement agencies, confirms, Paul Ferguson, an advanced threat researcher at Trend Micro.

McColo that hosted command and control servers to distribute spam instructions worldwide was responsible for nearly 70 percent of total spamming throughout the world. It had hosted world’s most dangerous trojan and spam carrying botnets; Srizbi, Mega-D and Rustock.

The operations carried by McColo could not be easily given up as it involved huge profits. In Russia, a backup connectivity system has to be kept before handing over the compromised systems to the control servers that updates instructions and spamming templates periodically.