Russian Business Network leaves Russia

Leading cybercrime hosting hub moves business to fresh pastures.

The notorious Russian Business Network (RBN), recently making headlines for the massive amounts of malicious and criminal content passing through its servers, has suddenly shut up shop in its St. Petersburg base and apparently moved its services to other countries.

A Trend Micro blogger, writing earlier this week (here), described the sudden shutdown as making the web 'a somewhat safer place', going on to express doubt that the crooks behind the malware, money laundering and child porn hosting system would stay quiet for long.

More investigation has indicated that many of the operations formerly hosted on the RBN servers are now coming out of China, with Turkey and Taiwan also reported to be hosting similar content. Some security watchers have suggested that the shutdown may have been imposed by upstream service providers removing connections to the so-called 'bulletproof hosting' service, and that criminal customers have taken their business elsewhere.

With the RBN thought to be closely linked to the 'Storm Worm' attack, others have speculated that the move may have been planned as part of another stage of evolution from one of the biggest and most serious threats for some time.

A detailed look at the RBN migration, with comment from several Trend experts, is in eWeek here. More commentary and analysis is on the Washington Post security blog here.

09 November 2007

Tags: bulletproof hosting, cybercrime, malware, russia, storm. del.icio.us digg this