Russian hacker gang goes dark to relocate;
may be moving to China
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName=security&articleId=9045929
By Gregg Keizer
November 07, 2007
Computerworld
The Russian Business Network (RBN), a notorious hacker and malware
hosting organization that operates out of St. Petersburg, Russia, has
gone off the air, security researchers said today.
According to a pair of Trend Micro Inc. researchers, RBN went dark
around 10 p.m. EST Tuesday. "The routing information for their IP
addresses has been withdrawn," said Paul Ferguson, a network architect
at Trend Micro. "That's significant because while RBN has had
connectivity issues in the past, then the routing [to its IP addresses]
was still being advertised. This time, they've been voluntarily
withdrawn.
"This is not the result of someone, such as their ISP, blackholing their
traffic," Ferguson continued. "This was done voluntarily." Another
report, however, on The Washington Post's Web site, claimed that while
RBN has severed links to the Internet, its upstream connectivity
providers had begun to refuse to route RBN traffic as early as
mid-October.