Posted in
Guest posts on November 13th, 2008 by Pingdom
Following an investigation by Brian Kreb at Washington Post that exposed the web hosting firm McColo as one of the main originator of spam on the Internet, the ISPs providing Internet access to the firm pulled the plug on them (effectively shutting them down).
The effect this had on the world’s spam levels was amazing. The amount of spam immediately dropped by between 66-75%, depending if you look at numbers from spam trackers IronPort (66%) or Spamcop (75%). A pretty amazing number no matter which one you pick.

100 spammers behind 80% of all spam
One really interesting thing about all of this is that if shutting down a single web host can cut the levels of spam to that degree, there can’t be all that many sources that send out spam in the first place. There are actually reports that indicate that about 80% of all spam is sent by just around 100 spammers.
Just a temporary setback for spammers
Sadly enough, the decline in spam after the shutdown of McColo is just temporary. According to Nilesh Bhandari at IronPort the “recovery” has already started as the spammers find other places to host their servers:
Bhandari said he expects the spam volume to recover to normal levels in about a week, as the spam operations that were previously hosted at McColo move to a new home.
“We’re seeing a slow recovery,” Bhandari. “We fully expect this to recover completely, and to go into the highest ever spam period during the upcoming holiday season.”
So, in just a week things may be back to normal. But for now, let’s enjoy this little break.
Want to test your site every minute?
Posted in
Main on March 17th, 2010 by Pingdom

Have you ever wondered how much money Google, Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Yahoo, Amazon and other tech giants have in the bank? What kind of assets do they have, how much spending money do they have? The vague answer is, “a lot.” But if you want to find out exactly how much, read on.
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Posted in
Main on March 12th, 2010 by Pingdom

Microsoft and open source, those are two things that traditionally don’t mix. Quite the opposite; the more hardcore members of the open source community tend to view Microsoft as just one step below Satan.
But while much of the open source community has little love for Microsoft, Microsoft is actually trying desperately to send some love back. The Redmond giant may have its own business reasons for doing so, of course, but that doesn’t change the fact that Microsoft is contributing to open source in more ways than most people are aware of.
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Posted in
Main on March 10th, 2010 by Pingdom
What do Android, Visio, Flash, Hotmail, Google Analytics and Powerpoint all have in common? Can you guess?
The answer is: None of them were created by the companies who now own them. They were acquisitions.
These products have continued to develop at their new homes, but the seed of innovation that sparked an actual, new product came from the outside. The key word here is innovation.
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Posted in
Main on March 5th, 2010 by Pingdom
We all know Google is huge and their wide range of services are bound to have a fair share of competitors, but you may be surprised just how wide-ranging Google considers its competition to be.
Here below we have included a quote from Google’s latest SEC filing with some very interesting information about what Google has to say about its competition.
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Posted in
Main on March 4th, 2010 by Pingdom
Big sites and services like Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter and many others rely heavily on open source software to run their operations. Happily, this isn’t a one-way street. They are also giving back to the open source community, not just by contributing to existing projects, but sometimes by open sourcing their own internal projects, giving back something completely new.
And what these popular sites can contribute is often quite valuable. Since they tend to be very large, they run big operations and have been forced to create solutions for scalability and performance problems that most other sites simply don’t have to deal with.
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Frank Paolino
November 13th, 2008 at 2:01 pm
What happens now that this botnets has no controlling source? Maybe they have a “default” malicious action if they cannot “phone home” for x days? Is a rogue botnet dangerous?
http://blog.maysoft.org/blog.nsf/d6plinks/FPAO-7LCJSG
Frank Paolino
November 14th, 2008 at 5:31 pm
Here is an article about “How to Build a Botnet” to try to understand how they could be destroyed.
http://blog.maysoft.org/blog.nsf/d6plinks/FPAO-7LDK5M