Profile of the Russian Business Network

The Washington Post has an article detailing what is known of the workings of the Russian Business Network, a shadowy entity based in St. Petersburg that hosts a good fraction of the world's spammers, identity thieves, bot herders, and phishers. RBN is not incorporated anywhere and may not technically even be violating Russian law. It provides "bulletproof hosting" for about $600 a month to a wide range of bad guys.The author of the Post story, Brian Krebs, supplements it with two blog posts. One provides more detail and back story including a look at one ISP's security admin who decided last summer to ban all RBN traffic from his network, with outstanding results. The other post maps some of the RBN's upstream suppliers and details the extent of the RBN's involvement in recent cyber-attacks: "Nearly every major advancement in computer viruses or worms over the past two years has emanated from or sent stolen consumer data back to servers" in the RBN.

Comments

Re:tragedy strikes!

[superwiz]

Sure, sure. Just take your enlightened views to the more appropriate forum... perhaps your local KKK meeting?

Even simpler - just DDoS the Russian Servers

[btarval]

All you need is the old martial arts trick of using your opponents attack against them.

These servers are used for phishing scams. But phishers can by lots of zombie botnets in order to send out their phishing scams.

So... Just point the botnets to these Russian Servers. That seems to me to be a lot cheaper than doing anything else. Including cleaning up the systems on your subnet.

Honestly, I'm surprised this hasn't happened already.