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FTC Shuts Down Calif. ISP For Botnets, Child Porn
An anonymous reader writes "The Federal Trade Commission has convinced a federal judge to pull the plug on a 3FN.net, a.k.a. 'Pricewert LLC,' a Northern California based hosting provider. The FTC alleges that 3FN/Pricewert was directly involved in setting up spam-spewing botnets, among other illegal activities, the Washington Post's Security Fix Blog writes. From the story: 'Pricewert hosts very little legitimate content and vast quantities of illegal, malicious, and harmful content, including child pornography, botnet command and control servers, spyware, viruses, trojans, phishing related sites, illegal online pharmacies, investment and other Web-based scams, and pornography featuring violence, bestiality, and incest.' The story quotes a former Justice Dept. expert saying the FTC action may be a smoke screen for a larger criminal investigation by the federal government in 3FN's activities."
...with their links which are suddenly broken.
Christopher Barton, lead research scientist at McAfee, said a number of 3FN domain name servers already have popped up at new locations online.
"The rats are running," Barton said.
Oh, that's a shame, maybe next time we should hand this matter over to the USAF or at least the FBI. You know, someone capable of exterminating or prosecuting the 'rats'?
Leibowitz said his agency would continue to pursue other ISPs that "provide a haven for Internet criminals."
"This is a signal that we're going to go after you, and you're not going to be able to hide behind the shroud of the Internet and be immune from enforcement action," Leibowitz said.
A signed copy of the FTC's complaint is available here (PDF).
Ahahah, is that a joke?
FTC Chairman Leibowitz: Let this very strongly worded complaint be a clear message to those that escaped yet again! We will not falter until we have lodged very strongly worded complaints against each and every one of you at least four times!
Botnet Leader: Jesus Christ, I think I just shit myself! My god, you just shut down one of like 50 ISPs we use! We might even have to go to another country to run our lucrative operations! Oh the horror of operating out of the Cayman Islands! Laying on the beach, raking in cash! Will you show us no mercy?!
So tell me, when will all the court cases be launched from the data you collected from the servers you confiscated in this coup de grace? They were operating out of Northern California, surely you contacted the appropriate law enforcement agencies, gathered a massive stack of warrants and cunningly orchestrated a perfect storming of all facilities to capture servers with juicy financial, IP, personal and foreign data? And then surely you froze the assets in these accounts and entered all this as evidence in a mounting trial against business and individuals foreign and domestic? Oh you didn't? Oh, you just warned their ISPs and strutted around waving a complaint and acting like you saved the day? Well done.
My work here is dung.
'Pricewert hosts very little legitimate content and vast quantities of illegal, malicious, and harmful content, including child pornography, botnet command and control servers, spyware, viruses, trojans, phishing related sites, illegal online pharmacies, investment and other Web-based scams, and pornography featuring violence, bestiality, and incest.'
Yes but how much were they charging per month? It doesn't say. You probably get all this stuff with the "premium" package.
I can tell you for sure, it sure as hell isn't Firefox. I'm about to give up, and my karma rating has been 'Excellent' ages.
Looks like the Slashdot clowns are "targeting" all browsers. Everything sucks.
Their Web 2.0 hard-on must be draining the blood from their brains. Slashdot is now slow, bloated, and fucked up.
Just try getting that asinine slide-bar to show ALL posts. No can do, because the script kiddies coding it up are too stupid to handle boundary conditions properly.
Slashdot doesn't work in any browser.
Also, they have a policy of launching new, untested, broken features mid week during peak usage.
In addition, they have a policy of "belittle and close" when you submit a bug to sourceforge.
This is like removing a telephone from the street corner in an attempt to thwart phone scams: Endless supply of phones for the evil-doers to move to.
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
But what makes it different than any other ISP?
Their bribe was late.
Blank until
Well the commment slider doesn't move when you click the "Toggle window location" button. White bars where the titles are so you can't see anything. Pages taking forever to render. That's just a few.
Yet another thing that NASA has done to help society, that people don't know. NASA's Inspector General (IG) played a large role in helping shut this den of crap down.
But what makes it different than any other ISP?
You mean other than this quote from the second sentence?
The FTC alleges that 3FN/Pricewert was directly involved in setting up spam-spewing botnets, among other illegal activities
I'm pretty sure Verizon, Time Warner, AT&T, Comcast, Cablevision, Cox, Suddenlink, just to name a few ISPs, aren't directly involved in any illegal activities on their network.
Turn off the new crap. Then it works.
I forget how I did that, though. Classic Index in Preferences?
Turn off the damn stupid "beta" index.
I wish they'd just frozen the interface about three years ago, but at least you CAN disable most of the gratuitous Javascript crap.
Anytime I see something referencing child pornography, I immediately think it's a smear campaign.
I don't know anything about 3FN.net, but generally...
ISPs don't host porn, they host websites. Some people put up websites that have porn or other content that someone might object to. Some websites have illegal content.
Sometimes people get frustrated because it's difficult to stop whatever activity it is they are trying to stop. Because an ISP provides its customers with anonymity, or because it doesn't log certain things, or because they are not cooperative with whatever branch of the government wants their cooperation does not make them bad. There are plenty of legitimate, good, positive-for-society reasons that anonymity or partial anonymity is necessary. There are ways of enforcing the law and bettering society that don't strip rights away from free people doing ordinary things.
Looks justfine in IE 6! Just have to enable Active X and set your security settings to "low".
Read between the lines.
Slashdot doesn't render properly on ANY browser.
The reason for this is because slashdot doesn't have a proper webdev writing their site. The may have a webdev, but obviously the person they have is not capable of meeting their needs.
Since the corporate overlords are cutting back on expenses, there is no room in the budget to hire a proper webdev. So the slashdot team has decided to purposely bork the site, keeping it just-good-enough-for-content-to-be-available, in the hope that some skilled webdev will offer their services for free to fix the site.
Or, possibly, the slashdot editors are playing passive-aggressive with the corporate overlord's demands that slashdot become more like a social networking site, and less like a news aggregator with comments. I think this has been hinted at by Rob & Jamie in the past.
Finally, the third possibility -- it's summer, which is kind of like the Septembers of yore on usenet. Maybe they're hoping to preserve the community by driving off the shambling hordes of idiots who belong on Fark or 4chan instead of here, while the slashdot core sticks around, knowing that things will simmer down in October. But that's probably wishful thinking.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
You do realize that the reason why you can't find public phones was to discourage drug dealers with pagers from doing business? Not that that matters anymore since evil-doers have cell phones.
I'm using browsers that get 100/100 on Acid3 and those don't have trouble.
Well, if you ask Alex Kozinski, Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit (United States v. Issacs), I'm sure he'd have a few words to say about this.
I'm pretty sure Verizon, Time Warner, AT&T, Comcast, Cablevision, Cox, Suddenlink, just to name a few ISPs, aren't directly involved in any illegal activities on their network.
Except spying on their customers for the government... though I guess that's not illegal any more.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Oh, that's a shame, maybe next time we should hand this matter over to the USAF or at least the FBI. You know, someone capable of exterminating or prosecuting the 'rats'?
Federal Trade Commission [Home]
A Brief Overiview of the Federal Trade Commission's
Investigative and Law Enforcement Authority (1) [1995]
Statutes Enforced or Administered by the Commission [Home]
"AN ACT To enhance Federal Trade Commission enforcement against illegal spam, spyware, and cross-border fraud and deception, and for other purposes."
U.S. SAFE WEB Act of 2006 [Final - Full Text]
To go into an office and get all the information needed to prove a criminal charge you have to provide evidence to convince a judge to give you a warrant. At least that's how it was before the new rules allowed Federal agencies to just say "terrorism" and skip past the middleman.
As a regulator, things are a little different. This guy has a license to operate and you are authorized to walk in and search his stuff just to see if he is complying with the terms of his license. If he isn't (virtually all licenses forbid criminal activity), you can just shut him down. In doing all of this you get to rifle throgh his files, interrogate his staff etc... Enough to gather the kind of evidence you can then pass on to the FBI or the local sheriff to say "Hey don't you have a cell reserved for people like this?"
This is just an extension of an old strategy. Just review the case of Al Capone if you are in doubt.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
I don't think so. Public phones were privately owned, so as long as they turned a profit, their owners wouldn't care too much what they were being used for.
The thing that killed public phones was the ubiquity of cellphones. Now, unlike 15 years ago, cellphones are cheap and everyone has them. It's simply no longer profitable to buy a public phone and pay for its service, when so few people are going to pop a quarter in one to use it.
Even drug dealers are probably happy about this, as they were a little obvious sitting around pay phones all day, and now they can just get a cheap prepaid cellphone and be completely anonymous and do their business from anywhere.
What about the "legitimate content" owners? If I was running a business, which provided my family income (6 dependents), and supported a customer base with services, the FTC just killed it without warning or justification.
You don't shut down a phone company (e.g. AT&T or Sprint) if someone is commiting crimes using a phone. If a local phone company or branch telephone office is "directly involved", again, the FTC does -NOT- kill phone service to the customers and businesses in the area.
"Sometime on Tuesday, more than 15,000 Web sites connected to San Jose, Calif., based Triple Fiber Network (3FN.net) went dark." How many thousands of those sites were legitimate businesses or customers who have been seriously hurt by the FTC exceeding its authority and requesting that upstream providers breach their contracts with 3FN.net. When one of these businesses goes under, or the soldier in Korea can't get the streaming video of his childs' birthday party, who do they call? The FTC?
The government is proud of itself for not doing its job. Actually prosecuting the criminals. If there haven't been any crimes, they had no right. If there have been crimes, they have a responsibility to prosecute. Either way, this action was both wrong and irresponsible.
Unlike the take down of McColo, I see no decrease of volume of spam at all. In fact, since April 2009, my spam level has gone back to and within the last week, above the level of spam since the before McColo and my mail server statistics follow Spamcop.net statistics.
http://www.spamcop.net/spamgraph.shtml?spamyear
IMHO, the botnets masters have dispersed themselves to multiple locations around the world so now taking down on an ISP will not affect them like McColo. On my mail server, most my spam comes from the Central and South America IP addresses and I think those systems are controlled by some bot master somewhere else.
However, IMHO, creating and hosting child porn is punishable by torture like waterboarding or worst. Dying is too good for those people.
Looks like the Slashdot clowns are "targeting" all browsers. Everything sucks.
Naw. Part of the content was hosted on 3FN and the FTC just took it down.
(It's a joke. Mod it "funny".)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The police in my area about ten years ago was cracking down on public phones in out of the way spots.
Gas station at a well lit corner? No problem.
Dark corner inside a hole in the wall pizza joint? Out, sometimes along with the liquor license.
Unless it involves homosexual identical twins, how can you even know it is incestuous anyway?
Sure, someone can say it is incest, but that's just wish fullfillment on the part of law enforcement.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
"from the child-porn-world-needs-more-suicides dept."
Several people who I know have been victims of child porn laws, despite not having paid for or traded anything and having therefore not encouraged or facilitated production. Rather than making assumptions about child pornography, you may consider researching the issue. You should also remember that visiting websites which are alleged to contain illegal images - without loading the images (by disabling images in the browser) - is not illegal and can provide significant insight into the issue.
I'd also suggest a critical consideration of the FTC's statements. The war on child pornography is often used as a cover for wars on slightly more popular content which happens to offend the state. I find it rather bizarre that so many people who are critical of the state tend to believe whatever the state and its subsidiaries says about child porn.
"To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free" ~ Nineteen Eighty-Four