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08.01.06
The Russians Are Everywhere
 By
David A. Utter
There are two truisms in the technology world that few in government want to state with any conviction - intellectual property piracy is rampant in China, and online crime operates unabated in Russia.
At least China gets some grief publicly from government officials, who call for Beijing to do more about IP piracy, pretty please, or we'll go to the WTO and complain about it.
When a Russian spam gang hit the Israeli anti-spam firm Blue Security with massive DDOS attacks, and forced the company to shut down, the silence was deafening. It's beyond the kid glove treatment Beijing gets; it's more like "see no evil."
Anyone who still may think complaints about Russia and Internet crime are overblown should consider the saga of Australian website 2feetfilms, whose owner received a shock phone call from his ISP about his website.
The Age reported how Phil Rich learned his site had been shut down by Pacific Internet. The ISP informed Rich that "this website has code which is able to be used to compromise the website it is hosted on as shown in the logs below."
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That code, embedded deep in the site, contained a URL pointing to a Russian website, and Unix commands that could compromise Pacific Internet's servers unless they were scrubbed clean.
Rich had that done, suffering four days of downtime while the code rewrite took place. The Age noted he was very surprised that his little-known site had been targeted by Russian criminals. "You tend to think it is just something that happens in places like the Pentagon," he said.
Pacific Internet believed the code had been manually inserted into the site, likely by a party in Russia. The ISP contacted those ISPs in Russia that were hosting the URLs being referenced by the offending code in the 2feetfilms website.
About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer with WebProNews.
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