(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — It has been a year since notorious spam host McColo was taken offline. Now, the group that led to its shutdown has found that more than 3,000 Internet addresses it used are a veritable “Internet ghost town,” haunted by the spectre of spam and malware hosting.
Two main Internet providers pulled the plug on McColo a year ago today after Security Fix, headed by Brian Krebs, presented evidence that McColo’s network was hosting massive amounts of spam and other illicit activity. Networks like McColo’s are typically shunned by the online community by including their numeric Internet addresses on blocklists. And even after unruly tenants have left, these addresses still scare off future occupants because many organizations configure their e-mail servers to reject these messages.
According to a blog post from Krebs, it could be a long time before blocks of McColo’s former Internet addresses become occupied again. Organizations using tarnished Internet addresses can find their legitimate emails being turned down by nearly all recipients.
“The problem is once an address block gets so polluted and absorbed into all these blocklists, it’s difficult to get off all of them because there is no central blocking authority,” Paul Ferguson, an advanced threat researcher at Trend Micro, told Security Fix. “That space won’t be toxic for all time to come, but certainly it is going to be tainted for whoever ends up with it.”
Security Fix notes, however, that its searches show that McColo is likely not on many blocklists. Despite that, the stigma of McColo remains, one year on.
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