It seems to be an intersting time for the spam-gangs these weeks. On Tuesday, 2008-11-11, the webhoster McColo was disconnected from the internet because he hosted master server of spam bot nets. As a result of this spam rates worldwide dropped to about 50%. Then last week on Friday, 2008-11-21, the german hoster InternetX was attacked by a DDoS against their DNS servers. And this time spam rates dropped again remarkably. I doubt that this had a worldwide effect, but at least my monthly mailgraph looks amazing now.
Hardly any spam during InternetX-DDoS
I don’t think I have to comment on the graph. It’s quite easy to see what happened. But unfortunately the spam starts to rise again since the DDoS stopped the weekend.
Just one question remains: Why exactly was there so few spam during this DDoS?
- Were the remaining bot nets busy with flooding InternetX and had no bandwith to send advertising?
- Does InternetX provide service in any way for the spammers, and therefore the DDoS blocked them as well?
- Do big parts of the spam delivery rely on DNS servers of InternetX and was therefore blocked as well?