Time To Exclude The Bad ISPs

In recent months, three questionable Internet service providers — EstDomains, Atrivo, and McColo — were effectively taken offline resulting in noticeable drops of malware and spam.

It is hard to argue that such takedowns, which took the command-and-control servers for several major botnets offline, would not benefit everyone who uses the Internet. Estimates of the decrease in spam from the McColo takedown ran from 40 to 80 percent, even if it lasted only for a short time. More importantly, as bulletproof hosting providers drop bad actors from their client list, the cost of hosting the command-and-control servers go up. Increasing the transaction costs to commit cybercrime is one of the best strategies to reduce it.

Time to Exclude Bad ISPs