Russian Web-hosting Company Rejected Allegations of Encouraging Online Crime

While security companies ridiculed a Russian Web-hosting firm as a zone for opening opportunities for cyber attacks, the firm insisted that it was largely a misunderstanding, when interacting with the Western Press.

RBN's (Russian Business Network) Tim Jaret said in an interview over e-mail that the organization failed to understand what grounds stimulated the others to frame such judgment about their company. Wired published this news on October 15, 2007.

Tim Jaret, who works in the abuse department of the RBN, further revealed that such an opinion could be only subjective based on guesswork.

Anti-spam groups and security researchers said that RBN, based in St. Petersburg, encourages the Internet scammers by hiring out servers to them to launch malware and phishing attacks, while they enjoyed full protection from the officials of the Russian government. VeriSign, in its report, described the business as "entirely illegal".

Chief Technology Officer, Johannes Ullrich, of the SANS Internet Storm Center, decided to totally stop RBN from crossing his network in June 2007 after a year's notice of a huge number of its customers being infected with virus, worms and password-stealing Trojans, which via different routes, used to feed back RBN-hosted networks with stolen data. Washingtonpost published this on October 15, 2007.

In a different statement, Ullrich said that his institute tracked RBN's activities for almost a year till it was fed up of cleaning customers who had visited malicious Russian URLs, or shutting down those sites. Washingtonpost published this on October 13, 2007.

In the majority of instances, one of the malevolent codes (whose writers have rented a considerable Web server space) compromised Ullrich's users. The most persistent malware, the Storm worm, which spread through e-mail to infect PCs added those machines to its botnet to send out massive spam, or used them to host scam Websites.

The most recent victim of the Storm worm attack was a major financial institution in the Indian subcontinent. In August, a virus created with Mpack toolkit compromised Bank of India's Website that transmitted stolen data to sites hosted at the networks of RBN, Paul Ferguson of Trend Micro said, according to Washingtonpost on October 1, 2007.

Related article: Russian Hackers Break into NOAA to Push Pills

» SPAMfighter News - 11/2/2007