WASHINGTON — The volume of junk e-mail sent worldwide may have dropped drastically Wednesday after a Web-hosting firm, identified by many in the computer-security community as a major host of organizations engaged in spam activity, was taken offline.
McColo, a San Jose, Calif., Web-hosting company that, according to computer-security experts, serves as a U.S. staging ground for international firms that sell items from counterfeit pharmaceuticals to child pornography, ceased operations after two Internet providers blocked Web access.
SecureWorks, an Atlanta security-services firm, estimates that McColo was responsible for 75 percent of all spam sent in the United States each day.
Global Crossing, a Bermuda company with U.S. operations in New Jersey and one of the two companies that provided Internet access to McColo, would not say why it cut off the company, but it said Global Crossing’s policy prohibits “malicious activity.”
Benny Ng, marketing director at Hurricane Electric, a Fremont, Calif., firm that served as McColo’s other Internet provider, said it decided to block the host firm after reading of allegations against McColo.
“We shut them down,” Ng said. “We looked into it a bit, saw the size and scope of the problem. . . . Within the hour, we had terminated all of our connections to them.”
McColo officials did not respond to several e-mails, phone calls and instant messages.
Paul Ferguson, a threat researcher with computer-security firm Trend Micro, said U.S. authorities should have been looking into the company and its customers a long time ago.
“There is damning evidence that this activity has been going on there for way too long, and plenty of people in the security community have gone out of their way to raise awareness about this network,” he said. “It’s a statement on the inefficiencies of trying to pursue legal prosecution of these guys that it takes so long for anything to be done about it.”
It is unclear the extent to which McColo could be held responsible for the activities of its clients.
