‘Like Cutting Off a Limb to Save the Body’
Summary: HostWinds, a Tulsa, Okla.-based hosting firm founded by Peter Holden, took on an email marketing client in July 2012 that offered to double its roughly $15,000 in monthly revenue, and the client referred more mailers until large tracts of the company's Internet addresses were listed by The Spamhaus Project and AOL began blocking its email wholesale. Holden then removed virtually all email marketers from the network, giving up about $150,000 in monthly revenue, and rebuilt the business over 2014 and 2015 around core infrastructure hosting.
What's compelling: The mailers were paying on time and operating within CAN-SPAM, which critics in the piece call essentially toothless and rarely enforced, so the legality of a customer tells you little about the risk it carries. HostWinds' Spamhaus listings and AOL block cut off email delivery for every other customer on the same addresses, and the cleanup cost $150,000 a month in revenue.
Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗
- Topics
- Data Breaches
- Related
- TSMC employee data breach linked to cloud provider Cyber Risks · Nov 15, 2026Data Breach at La Poste Subsidiary Maileva Affects 22 Million People in France Cyber Risks · Nov 15, 2026City of Osaka warns of data breach impacting 1 million as Japan reels from dozens of cyber incidents Cyber Risks · Nov 13, 2026