Someday a Real Rain Will Come and Wash All This Scum Off the Internet
by John Paczkowski
Posted on June 4, 2009 at 2:50 PM PT
The Federal Trade Commission today dropped the hammer on Pricewert LLC, a black hat ISP that it says is responsible for all manner of Internet malignancies. According to the FTC’s lawsuit, the company “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.”
Fun for the whole family — especially if your family is the Russian mafia …
Ugly stuff peddled by ugly people — people whom Pricewert went to great efforts to protect. According to the FTC, the ISP advertises its services in the “darkest corners of the Internet” and “actively shields its criminal clientele by either ignoring take-down requests issued by the online security community or shifting its criminal clients to other internet protocol addresses controlled by Pricewert so that they may evade detection.”
Good thing then that a Federal Judge in San Jose, California has ordered the company’s upstream internet providers and data centers to pull the plug on it. “Anything bad on the Internet, they were involved in it,” FTC Chairman Jonathan Leibowitz told Security Fix. “We’re very proud, because in one fell swoop we’ve gone after a big facilitator of some of the utterly worst conduct.”
Comments
“Anything bad on the Internet, they were involved in it,”
Is this a display of hyperbole or ignorance?
I have a feeling the dent this action makes on bad stuff happening on the internet will be virtually undetectable, or at best short-lived, like the various spam sources that have been shut down over the years.
Besides, Bill Gates “solved the spam problem” years ago.
Posted by Mac Beach at June 5th, 2009 at 1:09 pm