RSS
Twitter
Washington Post Story Convinces Service Providers To Pull The Plug On Major Spam Enabler
from the but-where-do-they-go dept
We're seeing a bunch of folks pointing out that evidence collected by the Washington Post's computer security writer, Brian Krebs, is basically responsible for getting that company kicked off the internet. Krebs is a fantastic reporter, so I don't doubt the story -- but I'm always a little skeptical of stories claiming that a huge percentage of spammers have been knocked offline. We see such stories every few months, and it never seems to have any real impact on the amount of spam out there. Just last month there was a report claiming that the world's largest spam operation was shut down, but the actual amount of spam flowing across the network did not decrease.
This case is a little different, in that it didn't shut down the spammers themselves, but rather a hosting company that apparently many of the largest zombie botnets relied on. However, it seems quite likely that they'll find some other hosting company that will gladly take them on and everything will be up and running again. That's not to say it's bad that these guys get taken down -- but at some point people should realize this seems like a big game of whack-a-mole, and there may be better, more efficient ways to tackle the problem.
