Economies of Scale in the Spam Business

It's disheartening that the economics of spam mean that it won't be going away any time soon. But a recent good-guy win offers an uncommon ray of hope in the fight against the black hats.

need a place to host their command centers, which distribute orders--send spam, launch an Internet attack, and the like--to their army of bot-infected PCs. offer that service, and typically ignore complaints from investigators who try to get them shut down. But recently, one major hosting center proved not so bullet-proof.

The companies that provided Internet access for the McColo Corp. datacenter, a provider in San Jose, yanked that access in November after the Washington Post shined the light on . The move had an immediate, drastic effect on spam levels. Matt Sergeant, a senior antispam technologist at MessageLabs, says that junk e-mail in his company's spam traps fell to about a third of its normal level after McColo's servers were cut off.

Sergeant and as spammers find new hosts. "But even if spam levels go back up as of tomorrow," he says, "it's absolutely a victory. Billions and billions of spam messages weren't sent."