According to Cloudmark and Spamhaus, SoftLayer, IBM’s new $2 billion acquisition, is the world’s largest source of spam with more than 85 spam block list issues.
SoftLayer said that it’s working with IBM, Spamhaus and a variety of authorities to stop the spamming, though Cloudmark recently said that wasn’t the case in an interview with Krebs on Security. In this interview, Cloudmark claimed that more than 42 percent of outbound email sent from SoftLayer’s servers is spam. That makes it the largest source of emails spam in the world for the third quarter of 2015.
To put the amount of spam being sent from SoftLayer’s servers in context, as of last week there were 685 spam issues associated with SoftLayer, says non-profit anti-spam organisation Spamhaus. Next on the list, Unicom-SC, had just 232 known spam issues.
“Current spam layers from SoftLayer are 600 percent higher than they were one year ago,” Cloudmark said recently. The company from San Francisco suggested that “Spam continues to plague the internet because …” some internet service providers sell their services to spammers for profit or don’t take the required actions “… to prevent spammers operating from their networks.”
However, Spamhaus believes the majority of the spam issues plaguing SoftLayer at the moment are the result of its efforts to expand into the Brazilian market which is growing at a rapid rate. “We believe that SoftLayer, perhaps in an attempt to extend their business in the rapidly growing Brazilian market, deliberately relaxed their customer vetting procedures,” Spamhaus suggested.
In response to requests for comment, SoftLayer released the following message, “IBM has removed all known spam accounts identified by the Spamhaus Project in this isolated spike. We continue to aggressively work with authorities, groups like Spamhaus and IBM Security analysts to eliminate further activity like this.”