FTC Shuts Down 3FN Webhosting Company
One webhosting company responsible for hosting hundreds of criminal operations, including spammers and child pornographers has been shut down by the FTC. The court order simply turned off the router. This company is now gone black.
From Brian Krebs at WaPo here:
In an unprecedented move, the Federal Trade Commission has taken legal steps to shut down a Web hosting provider in Northern California that the agency says was directly involved in managing massive global spam operations.
Sometime on Tuesday, more than 15,000 Web sites connected to San Jose, Calif., based Triple Fiber Network (3FN.net) went dark. 3FN’s sites were disconnected after a Northern California district court judge approved an FTC request to have the company’s upstream Internet providers stop routing traffic for the provider.
In its civil complaint, the FTC names 3FN and its various monikers, including Pricewert LLC — the business entity named on the 3fn.net Web site registration records. The FTC alleges that Pricewert/3FN operates as a “‘rogue’ or ‘black hat’ Internet service provider that recruits, knowingly hosts, and actively participates in the distribution of illegal, malicious, and harmful content,” including botnet control servers, child pornography and rogue antivirus products.
The FTC chairman confirmed that this was the first time the agency had sought and been granted an order to shut down an Internet service provider.
“Pricewert hosts very little legitimate content and vast quantities of illegal, malicious, and harmful content, including child pornography, botnet command and control servers, spyware, viruses, trojans, phishing related sites, illegal online pharmacies, investment and other Web-based scams, and pornography featuring violence, bestiality, and incest,” the FTC said.
I am happy to see the criminal operations taken down, but it is surprising that it was the FTC who did this instead of a law enforcement agency. Lets hope that LE is involved in actually trying to apprehend the people behind the malware and illegal content. Otherwise, these jokers will just move somewhere else.
