If the volume of spam hitting your inbox this weekend is down, you have the Federal Trade Commission to thank. On June 5, the FTC received a temporary restraining order to shut down Pricewert, a San Jose Internet service provider suspected of harboring spammers, peddlers of child pornographers and botnets.
Many ISPs are inadvertently hosting spam servers, and undoubtedly hosting many multiple more machines infected with bots, or malicious applications that take control of the host PC or server and uses it as a platform for spreading virus and spam emails. But what the FTC accuses Pricewert of is coordinating with “bot hurders” for the creation and control of more than 4,500 malicious applications on far flung machines.