Russian Hacker Gang Vanishes Again

Arashtamere writes "The shadowy hacker and malware hosting network that only recently fled Russia to set up operations in China has now pulled the plug there and vanished yet again. An analyst at VeriSign's iDefense Labs unit said iDefense had tracked RBN's migration earlier in the week from servers based in Russia to ones running in China, after obtaining at least seven net blocks of Chinese IP addresses. As of Wednesday, RBN controlled 5,120 IP addresses assigned to Chinese service providers; known RBN clients were even seen using those addresses that day. But with its China move putting the spotlights of the media and the security community on the organization, RBN suddenly went offline on Thursday. 'They severed connections to six of the seven net blocks on November 8,' the analyst said. RBN as a single organization may be dead and gone; it may even now be breaking up into smaller pieces farmed out to multiple countries' Internet infrastructures."

Comments

Hunt them down... big blocks of IP space = obvious

[compumike]

It seems like having all of your traffic on seven well-defined subnets is an easy way to make all of your activity really obvious.

But hey, at least these guys are being pursued and thwarted. There are way too many hackers and script kiddies out there who need to get their butts kicked one and become productive members of society with their skills. This is an important lesson and it comes at a price, but ultimately we need to convert these people to use their technical knowledge for good. By making it harder and harder for the underworld to survive, the economic benefits of that lifestyle become overshadowed by its risks. This will bring these people out into the light, and hopefully both reduce the economic pain they cause with their mischief, and also let them contribute constructively.

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Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.

Alternative Theory: Russian Mafia Groups

[reporter]

There may be another possibility. With so much unwanted attention in the media, the Russian Business Network (RBN) may voluntarily have broken up into numerous small groups. In much the same fashion, the alumni of the KGB have broken up into numerous small cliques. Each clique is essentially a mafia gang with a strongman as boss and wields considerable power.

As the Kremlin moves into cyberspace, each KGB clique will want a "piece of the action" and has absorbed some alumni of the RBN. In the 21st century, even the Russian mafia needs an online presence.

Don't be so fast

[DNS-and-BIND]

Well, based in China as I am, I can think of another reason the RBN stayed here for a few days and then quit. The internet connection to the outside world is horribly slow! I regularly get modem speeds when using US-based sites such as slashdot. If file transfers go above 10k/s then I'm ecstatic. I can't imagine that spammers would be happy with slow connections. I had a Nordic businessman ask me for some consulting recently. I talked to him, and he said that the internet was too slow between there and Denmark, and could I fix it? I just rolled my eyes and told him to talk to either Hu Jintao or the Ministry of Propaganda and Information...

Re:Don't be so fast

[Chief Wongoller]

Well, actually I'm in China too. The interesting aspect of internet access in China is that ISPs here always provide much higher upload speeds than download speeds, by a ratio of about 3 or 4 to 1. This is to serve the interests of Chinese exporters, by making Chinese based websites more accesable to the outside world. That is to say the internet in China is more about exporting data -good or bad- rather than importing. So China is rather a logical location for those hackers, especially as policing of the internet here is almost non-existant ( no fears about P-2P downloading here).Incidentally, download speeds, while slower than North America or Europe are not always painfully slow. Speed depends largely on where you live: I live a a modern building in a modern city and can get download speeds of 100k/s no problem.