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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.
But what makes it different than any other ISP?
Their bribe was late.
Blank until
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.
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.
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.
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]
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.