McColo Crackdown -- San Jose, California, USA

The Office sent us to America.

We have been in San Jose, California, for the last couple of days investigating the McColo Corp. Web hosting company. On the 11th of November authorities cut off the company’s upstream providers, in effect severing it from the Internet. The company is accused for hosting the botnets responsible for almost 75% of the world’s spam, as well as other cyber-criminal activity. Some of the code for the spybots and malware spawned from the McColo servers are considered to be so ingeniously malicious that The Office is wondering if extraterrestrial intelligences might not have been involved.

We have been speaking with many of the security researchers investigating McColo. A Mr. Stewart has been especially helpful although he insinuated that our search for “alien pixies is the weirdest thing [he has] ever heard,” but that he got orders to assist us in any way possible and would happily oblige, although “malware is the offspring of crackers, not ETs”. Crackers, it seems, are the criminals. While hackers, it appears, are the vigilante good guys.

Neither Doctor Tom Holtz, Miss Mary Tudor, nor myself know much about computer programming. We are all computer literate and Doctor Tom Holtz and I know how to work our electronic equipment, but even this leave us ill-equipped trying to follow Mr. Stewart’s description of internet security breaches, malware, spyware, open mail relays and open proxies, captchas, Sobig and Mimail virus-families, Bayesian filtering, FUSSPs, pink contracts, directory harvest attacks, worms, zombies and other obscure IT-jargon.

It turns out that my earlier experience with zombies is of no value here. Apparently zombies are computers infected with malware, and has nothing to do with Voodoo at all.

Although we are still trying to figure out exactly how ET-pucks could possibly fit in with the whole McColo fiasco, Miss Mary Tudor has confirmed puckish odours. I can only hope that we find something tangible soon. D-day is coming!