On 11th November, 2008, Brian Krebbs of the Washington Post announced that a major source of online SCAMS and SPAMS had been closed down. Brian's article goes into a lot of detail about how the culprits were tracked down but the crux of the story was, according to Mr Krebbs, "A U.S. based Web hosting firm that security experts say was responsible for facilitating more than 75 percent of the junk e-mail blasted out each day globally has been knocked offline following reports from Security Fix on evidence gathered about suspicious activity emanating from the network. "

The UK's Daily Post had this to say on the subject "Two major internet service providers (ISPs) cut off internet access to the company McColo.com on Tuesday. Carole Theriault, of internet security firm Sophos called it an 'unprecedented' move. It is believed the California-based company had a client list that included some of the world's largest cyber-criminal gangs who bombarded computers with unwanted messages. Online security firms estimated that spam rates fell up to 75 per cent shortly after the company's servers were disconnected."

Digesting that last sentence just makes your eyes POP doesn't it ... SPAM rates fell up to 75 per cent!! If you get 100 SPAM emails a day, that means you're automatically down to 25 in one fell swoop (78 billion SPAM emails a day emanated from McColo.com). So ... this is great news, we should all be celebrating ... unfortunately, I got the feeling the celebrations would be short-lived. On researching further it soon became apparent that McColo.com were back online, according to techrepublic.com, "Prophetically, as of  Nov. 15, 2008, McColo was back on-line. Ironically, experts are divided about this. Some were concerned that shutting McColo down would force the bot-masters to locate the command-and-control servers at multiple hosting sites, making them harder to track."

But the precedent has been set, shutting down this international collaboration will be the first of many, it would be hoped. And, international collaboration it was according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution "Authorities said Tuesday they have shut down one of the largest spam operations in the world, a vast network involving countries from New Zealand to China and the United States." and with a little help from India, Cyprus and The Soviet Republic of Georgia most continents were covered.

So the SPAM war is definitely a work in progress but from time to time the good guys actually win. I was happy to read in July 2008 that eBay and Google have joined forces to protect users from spam and malicious emails by leveraging an authentication technology called DomainKeys ... The development will mean fewer fake emails claiming to be sent by eBay and subsidiary PayPal, according to Google. As eBay and Google suffer 67% of phishing attacks, it's great to hear they're doing something about it.

I was listening to the radio in my car last month and unexpectedly tuned into a conversation about Security issues on the web ... the chap who was speaking did indeed mention his website but the name has escaped me ... his concern was that a lot of phishing targets know there are scam websites out there using their brands but do nothing about it, other than to warn / educate their customers about the scams. He cited the ANZ Bank of Australia as having over 100 scam phishing sites online using their brand at the present time. Horrifying statistics really.

It would be lovely to turn back the clock and revisit the web as it was in 1997, a right friendly place where people helped people and the words SPAM, PHISHING and VIRUS related to canned ham, trout angling and a head cold.

The saga continues ... I'll keep you posted.