Few tech companies carry greater weight than the IBM brand, which is instantly recognizable as one of the most trusted names in technology and security. But while ‘Big Blue’ might be among the most respectable and fastest-growing vendors in the software security market, the venerable company has just been outed as the world’s biggest source of spam emails.

Security blogger Brian Krebs made the revelations in a new report on Wednesday, labelling IBM’s SoftLayer cloud platform as “the Internet’s most spam-friendly” service provider.

According to Krebs, SoftLayer now ranks at the very top of a list of companies with the worst spam support ISPs. The list, compiled by the anti-spam group Spamhaus, identifies those ISPs with the worst abuse departments and “consequently, the worst reputations for knowingly hosting spam operations.”

Spamhaus said that as of this week, there were 685 known spam issues related to SoftLayer ISPs. That’s significantly more than the second-placed ISP on its list, Unicorn-sc, which has just 232 known issues.

Spamhaus notes that IBM SoftLayer has long been seen as a “responsible ISP,” and one that’s made key contributions to both the anti-spam and security industries. But unfortunately, it seems to have fallen victim to a ‘malware gang’ based in Brazil, according to a Spamhaus blog post from earlier this month.

In the post, Spamhaus says SoftLayer likely relaxed its customer vetting procedures in a bid to scoop up a greater share of business in the rapidly expanding Brazilian market.

But unfortunately for IBM, “Cybercriminals from Brazil took advantage of SoftLayer’s extensive resources and lax vetting procedures. In particular, the malware operation exploited loopholes in Softlayer’s automated provisioning procedures to obtain an impressive number of IP address ranges, which they then used to send spam and host malware sites,” Spamhaus said.

Spamhaus’ findings are confirmed by a second spam-tracking outfit called Cloudmark, Krebs said in his own blog post. He said Cloudmark agreed that SoftLayer’s network produced more spam in the third quarter of 2015 than any other ISP, accounting for a massive 42 percent of the world’s outbound email spam.

No doubt feeling somewhat embarrassed by episode, IBM SoftLayer moved quickly to put things right.

“IBM has removed all known spam accounts identified by the Spamhaus Project in this isolated spike,” a company spokesperson said. “We continue to aggressively work with authorities, groups like Spamhaus and IBM Security analysts to eliminate further activity like this.”

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