Russian Business Network leaves Russia

Posted by   Virus Bulletin on   Nov 9, 2007

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.

Posted on 09 November 2007 by Virus Bulletin

twitter.png
fb.png
linkedin.png
hackernews.png
reddit.png

 

Latest posts:

In memoriam: Dr Alan Solomon

We were very sorry to learn of the passing of industry pioneer Dr Alan Solomon earlier this week.

New paper: Nexus Android banking botnet – compromising C&C panels and dissecting mobile AppInjects

In a new paper, researchers Aditya K Sood and Rohit Bansal provide details of a security vulnerability in the Nexus Android botnet C&C panel that was exploited in order to gather threat intelligence, and present a model of mobile AppInjects.

New paper: Collector-stealer: a Russian origin credential and information extractor

In a new paper, F5 researchers Aditya K Sood and Rohit Chaturvedi present a 360 analysis of Collector-stealer, a Russian-origin credential and information extractor.

VB2021 localhost videos available on YouTube

VB has made all VB2021 localhost presentations available on the VB YouTube channel, so you can now watch - and share - any part of the conference freely and without registration.

VB2021 localhost is over, but the content is still available to view!

VB2021 localhost - VB's second virtual conference - took place last week, but you can still watch all the presentations.

We have placed cookies on your device in order to improve the functionality of this site, as outlined in our cookies policy. However, you may delete and block all cookies from this site and your use of the site will be unaffected. By continuing to browse this site, you are agreeing to Virus Bulletin's use of data as outlined in our privacy policy.