DARKMARKET

offer this service are essentially letting their customers know that they
are not interested in the content or function of a website and, in
exchange for much higher fees, will resist any legal or digital attempts
to bring down the sites.

Not all bulletproof hosting is intended as a way of circumventing
the law, but criminals and pirates frequently avail themselves of such
services. They are virtually indispensable for individuals and groups
involved in the distribution of child pornography, for example, and the
RBN was known to include such clients on its books, as several secu-
rity companies’ research departments have identified.

These hosts have also proved invaluable for people distributing spam
email, as these operations require huge, secure capacity in order to
spew forth their billions of dubious adverts and viruses. Nigerian 419
scams, counterfeit medicines, the now-fabled penis enlargers and many
other products (real or imaginary) are dumped on the world from
bulletproof hosts. Many spam messages conceal viruses or links to
infected websites, which, if activated, may turn a computer into a single
footsoldier in a botnet army.

As the Russian Business Network was booming in 2006 and 2007,
Spamhaus, the secretive anti-spam operation in Cardiff, listed it as
controlling 2,048 Internet addresses. It described the RBN as ‘among
the world’s worst spammers’ and home to vast ‘child pornography,
malware, phishing and cybercrime-hosting networks’.

The RBN’s primary significance lies in the profitability of such
bulletproof hosting organisations, which are able to charge $600 or
more a month. For legitimate websites, the cost would be one-tenth of
this.

But its secondary role is, in many respects, the more interesting
one. The attacks on Estonia began with millions of spam emails
swooping down on the computer networks of the Estonian government.
Subsequently François Paget, who works for the US computer-security
giant McAfee, analysed the content of the spam to discover that they
were identical to the standard RBN mailouts. Furthermore, Andy Auld,
the head of cyber intelligence at Britain’s Serious Organised Crime
Agency, reported that in their brief field-observation of the RBN in St
Petersburg, British police were able to establish that the RBN could
operate in part because it bribed local law enforcement and the judi-
ciary.