McColo Spam Botnets Taken Down to Chinatown

"I will be watching you and if I find that you are trying to corrupt my first born child, I will bring you down, baby. I will bring you down to Chinatown." -- Jack Byrnes, Meet the Parents

A San Jose, CA hosting company, McColo Corp, that many security experts claim is linked to spam, botnets, cyberattacks and child pornography; was taken offline yesterday by its internet access providers. Another spammer going down wouldn't be big news, but the sheer magnitude of McColo's impact caught my eye.

McColo servers are said to host botnets including Mega-D, Srizbi, Pushdo, Rustock and Warezov; and manage Torpig and Sinowal trojans, among others.

According to MSNBC's coverage:

"Multiple security researchers have recently published data naming McColo as the host for all of the top robot networks or "botnets," which are vast collections of hacked computers that are networked together to blast out spam or attack others online.

Collectively, these botnets appear to be responsible for sending roughly 75 percent of all spam each day, according to the latest stats from Marshal, a security company in the United Kingdom that tracks botnet activity"

Since being taken offline, security experts (and internet users) are reporting significant drops in spam activity. In the near term, this sounds great. However, I wonder how many new, smaller, offshore, and harder to monitor "bulletproof" hosting services this event will spawn.

I've always liked the investment potential of internet security and network management, the value of that sector just ticked up again...

Related posts:
- Alex Lanstein, FireEye
- Susan Hall, ITBusinessEdge
- Jose Nazario, Arbor Networks
- Virtual Blight
- John Biggs, CrunchGear