In November 2008, McColo corp was shutdown by a group of security experts from a US web hosting firm. McColo was a web-hosting servers that spammers, scammers and hackers were using exclusively to spam people with emails and to co-ordinate large spamming attacks. Immediately after McColo was shutdown spam traffic dropped a massive 70% according to Postini (anti-spam division of Google), much to the joy and cheers of internet folk all over.

Unfortunately, the good news ends here. Since the November shutdown of McColo, the spammers have since recovered and have made the necessary shift from static nodes (like McColo) into a more peer-to-peer based system. In other words, spam is back and it’s going to be more difficult to shut down in the future.

“What the spammers have been using to rebuild is more technically advanced than what got taken out and is itself a more resilient technology,”

Postini announced recently that spam levels have risen back to their previous levels – 94% of all emails sent worldwide are spam.

Spam truly is back, and here to stay.