RSSFTC shuts down bad-actor ISP
By Angela Gunn | Published June 5, 2009, 9:24 AM
Remember last autumn, when the McColo takedown made the spam go away and brought sweet, sweet (relative) peace to all our inboxes for a while? It's not likely that the closure of Pricewert will have that sort of direct effect on most of our lives, but a district court judge's ruling to have the plug pulled on the ISP will certainly improve the Internet in other ways.
The ruling was made at the request of the FTC, which has a long history of history with Pricewert. The ISP is believed to have engaged in a variety of offenses -- botnets, yes, but also malware distribution, fake pharma sites, investment scams, and some of the very worst kinds of pornography. (Yeah, they had that. Yeah, they had that too.) Takedown requests made to the ISP -- operating under a variety of names, including 3FN, Triple Fiber Network, APX Telecom, APS Telecom, and APS Communication -- have been either ignored or dodged by shifting the content to another bank of IP addresses under Pricewert's control.
The takedown is just one step in the process of getting rid of an alleged bad actor. For now, the ISP is offline and its business assets have been frozen. Guilt or innocence will be decided in a court of law, and of course the ISP's upstream provider and data centers will have some thoughts on whether they want to do business with this outfit again.
Max Christopher, a spokesman for the company, told the press that the company has in the past attempted to work with law enforcement to deal with complaints, and that they'd heard nothing from the FTC prior to the shutdown, which "has ruined our reputation." That's cute, but the text of the complaint (PDF available here) indicates that Pricewert officials have been observed getting intimately involved with dirty doings, including "directly participating in the creation and configuration of a botnet." In one memorable incident cited, ""the head of Pricewert's Programming Department agrees to assist [in setting up a large botnet for a potential client], but complains upon learning of the size of the botnet that it will require a lot of work."
Pricewert is registered as an Oregon corporation, but its principals and senior staff are Eastern European and located overseas.
honestly, it seems all too common that if any federal department does just one thing every few years, they make a BIG DEAL out of it as if it were some monstorous task.
i'm not patting ftc on the back just because they undertook a meagor step. instead i would like to kick them in their ass's and maybe help them jump start to do their JOB instead of sitting around and cheating the tax payor out of wages and retirement.
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|FYI, they're not ISP, they're hosting provider. I.e. they were providing servers and bandwidth for web sites, not just pipes for end-users. I think it's important distinction.
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|ISP means Internet Service Provider.
Hosting is an Internet Service. Hence, they are an ISP.
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|"It's not likely that the closure of Pricewest "
Pricewest or Pricewert?
Either way, good to see another spam-generator go down (in a good way?). *grin*
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|PC, lol. Is going down ever a bad thing? OK, I guess it is if you are in an airplane. unless you are a mile high and going down while maintaining altitude.
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|Well this explains why my mailserver's zombie reject rate started to drop about 80% of normal levels around 8pm GMT yesterday.
I'd say that was strong circumstantial proof of what they were really up to.
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|What exactly is
"which has a long history of history with Pricewest."
How long is a "Long history of history"?
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|Depends, FixXxer -- have you got a history with any person, place or thing? How long is it? Well...
(This is one of those regional usages, then? Dunno, but I always liked the way the phrase flowed. I'm keeping it. The Pricewest-Pricewert thing I will fix though with thanks; I swear I typed that wrong every single time last night, and apparently I only caught it n-1 times. Feh.)
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|Heh, not picking on you Angela. Just something I noticed that didn't really set right when reading. Meh, I guess its like the department of redundancy department :)
Good article none-the-less!
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|Or like reversing backwards? or taking a little bit? Jajaja, I kid I kid.
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|"The Pricewest-Pricewert thing I will fix though with thanks; I swear I typed that wrong every single time last night, and apparently I only caught it n-1 times. Feh."
Heh... We only point them out because you handle them so well. *grin*
Honestly? You're probably the most read (or at least most enjoyed) article contributor here...which is saying a lot considering it's been a short stint so far. Here's hoping you stick around a while!
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