DDoS - The Hunt for Russia's Cybercriminals

It’s been described as a ‘curious game of cat and mouse’ as online web hunters close in on the Russian cybercriminals threatening e-commerce with DDoS attacks.

Investigating in The Guardian newspaper, journalist Peter Warren tracked the story of high tech hunters on the trail of the Russian Business Network (RBN), a criminal cyber-ring blamed for 60% of all internet crime. DDoS attacks are an efficient way of disabling major websites, leading to extortion and blackmail. DDoS can be used as an effective e-weapon for commercial or political and ideological motives.

The DDoS threat
Although DDoS was first in the headlines some years ago with the end-of-the-world-is-nigh chaos stories that proliferated during the run up to the millennium, the DDoS threat hasn’t gone away. The threat of a DDoS attack by cyber-terrorists targeting financial institutions or governmental websites - whose web downtime could create panic, loose money or generate massive negative publicity - is very real. The hunt for the Russian cybercriminals heated up when the Russian ISP suspected to be behind the web crime - from DDoS to child pornography - left St Petersburg and made for servers in China.

RBN, DDoS and Botnets
But then the RBN’s ruse failed and they vanished from the web. Experts say attention from the US media forced RBN to vanish. But some computer security experts still think various criminal activities appearing around the world are being hosted by the criminal network. The RBN, set up by young entrepreneurs, like Google or eBay, has a dark underbelly unlike its Western counterparts. As Warren wrote in his report: “Go onto Russian underworld servers and you enter an emporium of crime, with lists of looted documents, stolen identities and hijacked computers already assembled into botnets.“ Bots are encrypted and used to launch DDoS attacks capable of bringing down websites.

Hackers dubbed ‘freedom fighters’
Cyber crime is big business in Russia attracting high calibre graduates and techies. Although RBN began as a legitimate website in 2006, it soon entered criminal cyberspace, lured by the big money at stake. RBN hosted criminal activities online from phishing, malware, DDoS attacks and spamming. For some, its DDoS attacks and cyber crime has been glamorised, the hackers dubbed ‘freedom fighters’ against ‘fat westerners with too much money’. Whether or not RBN is still active or gone to ground, the feeling is that cyber crime will only increase, and companies need to take more vigilant steps to protect themselves from DDoS attacks.

Webscreen is an IT network security technology that is designed to protect Web servers and other network appliances from a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS). A DDoS attack is a deliberate attempt (malicious) to stop a Web site from working by flooding it with thousands or simultaneous connections. This is usually done for financial gain but can be for political or commercial reasons. Webscreen's unique Guarantee of Service (GoS) technology not only mitigates the impact of denial of service (DDoS) attacks but enables IT managers to maintain access for critical users and priority customers during any high level network activity period. Including a range of network optimisation and monitoring tools, Webscreen helps deliver maximum performance from network infrastructure resources. Find out more, contact Webscreen call 0870 3890022