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(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- After four months gathering data about web hosting service provider McColo (www.mccolo.com), the Security Fix blog has found the San Jose host may be hosting "some of the most disreputable cyber-criminal gangs in business today."
According to Washington Post's Security Fix blogger Brian Krebs, McColo's malicious hosting was not limited to spam. "It included child pornography sites; sites that accepted payment for spam and child porn; rogue anti-virus Web sites; and a huge malicious software operation that apparently stole banking and credit card data from more than a half million people worldwide," Krebs wrote in a blog post.
Looking up one of those IP addresses shows McColo Corporation has leased a large range of IP addresses to Moscow-based Digital Infinity, which was found responsible for Psycheclone, a web bot used for harvesting e-mail addresses starting in June 2006. According to the Code Cave blog (www.thecodecave.com), McColo's IP addresses have also been "a major source of Wordpress comment spam."
Krebs contacted the major internet providers for McColo including Fremont, California-based Hurricane Electric. "We shut them down," director of marketing for Hurricane Electric Benny Ng told Krebs. "We looked into it a bit, saw the size and scope of the problem you were reporting and said 'Holy cow! Within the hour we had terminated all of our connections to them."
As a sign that McColo's hosting business is all but finished, McColo's home page is no longer available. Crebs and three other researchers report that they could not reach a single webpage assigned to McColo.
Read Back Issues of WHIR Magazine
October 2009 - Web Hosting's All Star Team
This has been, for us, one of the most interesting, exciting and challenging build-ups to an issue of the magazine yet, Web Hosting's All Star Team. The balloting process was our first experiment with a kind of user participation we're planning to do a lot more with in the months to come. We had thousands of ballots submitted, with hundreds of write-in suggestions and a demonstration of user engagement that has us feeling super positive about the project.
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July 2009 - What am I Worth?
One of the interesting luxuries of working on a project like the printed WHIR magazine is that it allows us to play with things like our point of view from one issue to the next. In recent months we've been giving added attention to the kind of practical and applicable advice aimed at smaller hosts and resellers. This issue carries on with that point of view, asking, in our cover story, "what am I worth?" It's a complicated question without a clear-cut answer.
About This Issue | Read Digital Edition
May 2009 - The Blueprint for a Small Web Host
I was a little surprised by how difficult it became to see this idea through. We set out to assemble a blueprint for a small hosting business, but butted up pretty quickly against the general impossibility of covering all the territory that was out there to be covered. The basic constraints of a printed magazine, and the less-than-infinite amount of time we had available forced us to face the fact that we could never produce an exhaustive guide to starting a hosting company.
About This Issue | Read Digital Edition
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