Part of the reason for the Internet community’s stunted response to the malware and spam epidemic to date is that many policymakers and cybercrime experts tend to dismiss spam as a nuisance problem that can be solved or at least mitigated to a manageable degree by the proper mix of technology and law enforcement. Given the increasing menace of spam email and related cybersecurity assaults that directly affect consumers and companies, you may be wondering why governments, law-enforcement officials, and corporations aren’t taking a stronger and more significant stance to stop the tidal wave of spam and cybercrime impacting us all. This was a major event in the cybercrime underworld. The same Crutop.nu members who spread pictures and news of the incident were some of McColo’s most successful Web hosting customers, and many felt obligated (or were publicly shamed by forum administrators) to shell out funds to help Kolya’s family pay for his funeral expenses. Among the first to broadcast the news of Kolya’s death were denizens of Crutop.nu, a Russian-language hacker forum that counted among its 8,000 members some of the world’s biggest spammers.

Instead, they were merely used by the botmaster businesses to manipulate millions of PCs scattered around the globe into becoming spam-spewing zombies.īy the time paramedics had cleared the area of Kolya’s accident, gruesome images of the carnage were already being uploaded to secretive Russian Internet forums frequented by McColo’s friends and business clients. But the servers at McColo weren’t generating and pumping spam themselves that would attract too much attention from Internet vigilantes and Western law-enforcement agencies. Nearly all of the botnets controlled from McColo were built to blast out the unsolicited junk spam advertisements that flood our inboxes and spam filters every day.

Spam Nation by Brian Krebs