Tainted Internet Adresses
Internet addresses that are tainted by crime and are practically like ghost towns now – totally deserted and are haunted forever. It’s a case of gothic high tech.
A year ago, the internet community witnessed the unplugging of McColo, a web host based in Northern California. For the longest time, the facility controlled a huge part of the spamming operations in the world. McColo’s main ISPs abruptly pulled the plug on them after Security Fix came out with evidence that tied massive amounts of spam and other illicit online activity to the network run by McColo.
Of course, this led to the reduction of spam traffic in cyberspace. But it also meant that a huge part of the virtual real estate that once used by McColo is now eerily quiet – like cyberspace ghost town. Empty domains without hosting services.
More than 3,000 internet addresses are now practically empty and are unable to attract new occupants. It’s as if some sort of toxic sludge has been thrown over the address blocks that no one would dare use them anymore.
This could be true. After all, the online community frowns on networks that harbour spammers as well as on organizations that host malware and other bad things, listing their numeric internet addresses in block lists. A lot of organizations usually configure their email servers to keep away communications coming from addresses on block lists and a heavily blocked network becomes an unattractive prospect to legitimate businesses because there’s no way that they can send email from those addresses and get favourable reception.
To make matters worse, once an address gets onto a block list, it’s next to impossible to get it off on all those lists because of the absence of a central blocking authority. While the space wouldn’t be tainted forever, it will carry the stigma of illicit activity.
