Abstract

On 11 th November 2008 McColo, a Californian server hosting company was disconnected from the Internet. This took the controllers for several major botnets offline. It has been widely reported that email spam volumes were markedly reduced for some time thereafter. This brief study examines the email arriving at a medium-sized United Kingdom ISP in October and November 2008. It confirms the drop in spam volumes, whilst noting a disproportionate impact on some of the ad hoc measures used to detect email spam.

Citations