ISPs have pulled the plug on a hosting firm responsible for running spam-producing botnets.
This week saw global spam levels drop significantly after two major US internet providers pulled the plug on spurious hosting firm McColo.
In the immediate aftermath anti-spam firms reported an astounding 70% reduction in the amount of junk mail in circulation.
Californian based McColo is believed to have hosted domains for spam gangs running some of the most prolific spam-producing botnets in the world, in addition to a number of fake pharmacy, antivirus, designer goods and child pornography sites.
ISPs Global Crossing and Hurricane Electric, who were together responsible for providing 90% of McColo’s access to the wider internet, shut off the firms access on Tuesday after receiving a detailed report from the Washington Post. The report culminated a four month investigation by Security Fix, the newspaper's security blog, into activity emanating from McColo-hosted domains.
While it is yet unclear as to whether McColo will be officially investigated and held legally responsible for the immoral activities of its clients, the company have responded by shutting down all operations.
Unfortunately however, while the decisive activities of Global Crossing and Hurricane Electric may offer a short term reprieve from the deluge of spam sent over the internet, experts predict that it is only a matter of time before the cyber-criminals find another host willing to turn a blind eye to their operations and the onslaught begins again.
"It is an unprecedented drop but will be a temporary outage as the networks move from North America to places where there is less scrutiny" said Jason Steer, a spokesman for anti-spam firm Ironport, in an interview with the BBC.
"Spam levels will come back to normal as we build up to Thanksgiving and Christmas" he predicted.
