Slashdot Mirror
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.
Depends on what they're a haven to, now, doesn't it?
Put another way, anonymity and secrecy can be used for good - anyone living in an oppressive country can attest to that. Or it can be used to send "3n1arg3 y00r p3nis" spam en masse. I think we can agree on the idea that the existence of data havens is a potential godsend, but the misuse of those havens is a huge headache.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
It makes a lot of sense to use the Spamhaus RBL to block things in a firewall. If a site is black listed for sending spam, then I don't want any traffic from that site, not email, not web traffic, anything. However, I am not aware of a system that ties an iptables DROP rule to an RBL.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Like I want AT&T to be able to decide what parts of the internet are "off-limits" to me? Like there's any reasonable way of doing this anyway? The Internet was developed with the goal of routing around broken segments in mind. This is not a problem with a market solution. This is a problem where the U.N. tells Russia to get its shit together, and stop these guys from doing things that piss off the rest of the world. Nigeria can get the same treatment. If there's some other group behind all the foreign lottery scams that are apparently being sent out by botnet, then I'd like to get them locked down too.
I see your informative link, and raise you a pithy comment.
I think we can agree on the idea that the existence of data havens is a potential godsend, but the misuse of those havens is a huge headache.
I'm not sure I'd even agree with that. I am pretty much a pragmatist when it comes to on-line anonymity: I think it is, on balance, overwhelmingly a bad thing. Much the same arguments apply to data havens.
Sure, these things can theoretically protects discourse, investigative journalism, whistle-blowing and such in an undemocratic society. However, practice is a long way from theory, and on-line "anonymity" is a long way from on-line anonymity. Does anyone really believe, despite the fact that I post under an alias here, that from a technical perspective my government could not track a post back to me if it really had sufficient motivation to do so? Does anyone really believe that if I had sufficiently sensitive information and stored it on a system hosted in one of these less legally restrictive regimes that the Powers That Be could not track it down and take steps to contain it?
Meanwhile, we have spammers, phishy types such as identity thieves and credit card fraudsters, deceptive folk like inside traders and corporate PR plants, copyright infringers, and countless other people basically abusing a near-anonymous Internet identity and data centres like the one in this article to further their own interests, often at the expense of others... and getting away with it, because no-one has the resources to stop them all reliably.
For what it's worth, I don't like this position. I appreciate the value of free communications, and I'm well aware of the inhibition imposed by having to put your name to something, and the damage this can do in extreme cases. But I also appreciate the value of privacy, and of being left to mind your own business without constantly having to defend yourself from attacks. Until society grows up, learns not to trust information or offers from anonymous sources, and learns to respect sensitive information — and it has a very long way to go to reach that point — I think we'll do a lot better if people on the Internet are not effectively placed above the law and not held accountable for their actions.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
IMO, I'd rather do the blocking myself than have AT&T do it for me. That being said, I don't hesitate to block RBN traffic.
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
There is a good line in Dune -- "You control a mentat by controlling his information." The religious crowd is easily aroused by "think of the children." Apparently, the slashdot crowd needs to hear "think of the spam." This is how the world network for all-to-free an exchange of information will be fractured. You just need to find a hot-button issue for every crowd and they'll scream for the separation along national borders on their own (thinking it's their own idea).
A good number of the posts so far propose blocking Russia altogether. Because there is no "business" done with Russia. Aha. But that means no Russian news. No access to chats with Americans for Russians. Hell, the new Russian order couldn't dream of a better situation. Not only do they get not to have their citizens interact with Americans freely, but they also don't have to be the bad guys in it. The Jefferson quote states that giving up freedom for a little bit of security will cause one to lose both. But why go that far? "little bit of security" is not even necessary as the price. Apparently a little bit of expediency is enough.
It's censorship and xenophobia even if you can make a Yakov Smirnoff joke of it. Sorry, but this time, the boogie man is you!
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Actually, a bomb blowing up the entire Microsoft complex, killing everyone involved in Windows (but nobody else) would produce a massive demand for jobs in the IT sector, programming sector, pretty much every technical field you can think of. Apple, Red Hat, Sun, Oracle, Novell, and so on would see massive gains in profits. The Rest Of The World (TM) would take relatively small hits- those who are still on XP would stay on XP (and start a Mac or Linux migration plan instead of a Vista one), those who have finished their Vista migration would be in good shape for a few years until it's time for their next hardware upgrade, and those who are in the middle of a switchover to Vista may well get totally fucked, depending on how they're doing it. It wouldn't be pretty in the short term, but it'd be survivable, and it's likely that replacing the monoculture with diversity would result in long-term economic gains due to competition. I actually think gaming companies would get hit the hardest, I have no idea how hard it is to take a game coded for Vista/360 and port it to another console. It's probably still a drop in the bucket of the greater economy. The biggest hit would probably be Wall Street investment bankers and so forth, but that's a single immediate hit, and not something that has a long-lasting effect. (A long-lasting effect would be something like a calamitous food shortage, sudden oil shortage, whatever; that results in an immediate hit followed by a long period of economic inefficiency because of a lack of resources for other industries to continue their business.)
Care about privacy? Read this!
I'm sorry, but civil disobedience usually involves getting intentionally caught and punished for doing something that should not be wrong, thereby bringing public attention to the issue. Anonymity is useful for practising freedoms denied by your government, but it doesn't enable true civil disobedience.
That's a variant on the broken window fallacy. The idea that breaking somebody's windows is a good thing because it creates work for the glazier, the police, etc. It only works from an internal viewpoint that is based on the relative distribution of wealth. Taking a broad overview of society as a whole, it's pretty plain to see that the total wealth has gone down. It's the same sort of protectionism as farm subsidies. It may keep people in work but its at the cost of having an inefficient, bloated economy. Far better than to create jobs through needless destruction and inefficiency, is to create jobs by aiming higher and achieving more as a society.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
I started blocking Russian, Nigerian, and other addresses from one of the forums I run. It's just a community forum for people in Houston, Texas. In a matter of hours I started getting complaints from regular users who I didn't realize were expat oil execs and workers in Russia, Nigeria, etc... who used my forum to keep up on things going on at home.
The lesson I learned is that even if I can't imagine why someone would want something doesn't mean it isn't something someone would want.
-- I'm old enough to have lived through six different meanings of the word "hacker."