Speaking to the Western press for the first time, a Russia-based web-hosting firm pilloried by security companies as a free zone for online crime insists that it's really just misunderstood.
"We can't understand on which basis these organizations have such an opinion about our company," Tim Jaret of the Russian Business Network says in an e-mail interview. "We can say that this is subjective opinion based on these organizations' guesswork." Jaret's e-mail signature identifies him as working in RBN's abuse department.
Security researchers and anti-spam groups say the St. Petersburg-based RBN caters to the worst of the internet's scammers, renting them servers used for phishing and malware attacks, all the while enjoying the protection of Russian government officials. A report by VeriSign called the business "entirely illegal."
"They just figured out that in Russia no one will prosecute them, or if they do, they can pay them off," says Johannes Ullrich, chief technology officer of the SANS Internet Storm Center. Ullrich says RBN maintains a veneer of legitimacy by paying lip service to abuse complaints, but nothing more.
"What typically happens is a phishing site sets up with RBN, and when someone complains enough, RBN will take it down. But it will be back up the next day," Ullrich told Wired News. "There is lots of pseudo-compliance."
RBN allegedly rents dedicated servers to online criminals for $600 per month, promising "bullet-proof hosting." That term means sites won't be taken down when complaints are made, according to an analyst for iDefense, VeriSign's cybersecurity reporting arm, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
RBN offers customer support, has partners and subsidiaries, and sells various tiers of service. "If I were engaged in cybercrime, I would totally use them," says the analyst.
But Jaret, in what appears to be RBN's first press interview since the firm was founded in June 2006, claims the organization has made efforts to respond to complaints of wrongdoing on its network.
"We tried to cooperate with one of such organizations called Spamhaus, and this experience showed that such cooperation wasn't constructive."
Spamhaus, an antispam operation, includes the entire 2,048 internet addresses controlled by RBN on its widely used blacklist of known spammers. It lists the network as "among the world's worst spammer, child-pornography, malware, phishing and cybercrime-hosting networks" -- a description that displeases the RBN.
"Now we are considering a lawsuit as a way of resolving this issue," Jaret says of Spamhaus.
Spamhaus did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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