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Tech CEO sentenced to 5 years in IP address scheme

krebsonsecurity.com

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Re: Tech CEO sentenced to 5 years in IP address scheme

#131

Post by roughly »

crhulls wrote: post #122

I find myself looking at the guy's picture and telling myself "of course that is what he looks like!" But on the flip side, we all know it is a bad idea to judge a book by its cover. How many times can we all recall doing this and feeling bad when our snap judgement was incorrect? But look at the guy! What is it we are all picking up on in these comments. I am not the only one. Is there something about how he is posi…

There's a difference between physical characteristics and fashion. You should not judge someone by their physical characteristics - by and large that's out of their control. Their fashion, on the other hand, is how they've decided to present themselves, and is absolutely fair game for judgement, especially for things like corporate headshots in which one is very intentionally choosing how they would like to be viewed by the world.

This fellow decided to present himself as something like a cross between a pickup artist and a street magician, which seems like it was pretty on the money.

Re: Tech CEO sentenced to 5 years in IP address scheme

#132

Post by tialaramex »

itchyouch wrote: post #117
tlogan wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. If he had real people or real companies buying these IP addresses (even if they are shell companies) he would be fine. Apparently he started like that but then he got greedy and said: fuck I will just invent some fake people. The actual criminal activity (fradulent affidavits, forged signatures) started in 2017.

I worked for a dial-up ISP that was going out of business and their last hurrah was selling renting servers doling out clean IPs from their /16 blocks so the clients could spam like crazy. Then we encountered these spammers were willing to forge BGP LOA stating that they could announce certain, defunct and unused blocks on BGP. I left there in a hurry, but it seems like they got away with it for a while. It would've…

Of course if the transit providers did a better job (to be fair you're talking about years ago when this wasn't close to practical) they'd reject the announcements as bogus, no need for administrative punishment if it just doesn't work so nobody tries it.

Today RPKI means that machines can in effect authenticate the LOA, the same way your web server is able to prove it's itchyouch.example (or whatever) to a web browser, the real owners of 203.0.113.0/24 can prove to a machine they're the real deal and you aren't. Unfortunately there are still transit providers who don't do that, or have it set just to bring the discrepancy to the attention of a human.

Re: Tech CEO sentenced to 5 years in IP address scheme

#133

Post by hinkley »

chatmasta wrote: post #90
mjan22640 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how much is that?

Apparently between 15 and 30 percent of the recovered proceeds: > In general, the IRS will pay an award of at least 15 percent, but not more than 30 percent of the proceeds collected attributable to the information submitted by the whistleblower. https://www.irs.gov/compliance/whistleblower-office

On (taxes and fines on) 2 billion? That’s practically conspiracy-to-whistleblow territory. Get a couple coworkers to help you collect evidence.

Re: Tech CEO sentenced to 5 years in IP address scheme

#136

Post by adventured »

crhulls wrote: post #122

I find myself looking at the guy's picture and telling myself "of course that is what he looks like!" But on the flip side, we all know it is a bad idea to judge a book by its cover. How many times can we all recall doing this and feeling bad when our snap judgement was incorrect? But look at the guy! What is it we are all picking up on in these comments. I am not the only one. Is there something about how he is posi…

The photo gives off RapGenius founder vibes (google their photos for anyone not around for the time when the tech media proclaimed that site was going to be the next big thing).

Re: Tech CEO sentenced to 5 years in IP address scheme

#137

Post by hinkley »

avar wrote: post #38
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #6

This highlights something tangential, but interesting nevertheless: Oftentimes getting embroiled in a civil lawsuit will, if impropriety is uncovered via the process of discovery, lead to separate criminal charges. The lesson here is that if you have something to hide, and it looks like you're going to be dragged into civil court (especially Federal civil court,) you should rush to settle or beg for arbitration behin…

Wouldn't it be better to rush to a country without an extradition treaty with the US?

At this point are there any that don’t also have huge problems with blackmail and extortion? It’s like being the weakest pirate on Pirate Island. You might have a bad time.

Re: Tech CEO sentenced to 5 years in IP address scheme

#138

Post by starttoaster »

mrweasel wrote: post #124
overgard wrote: post #47

Honest question, why are we not all just on IPV6 now? It seems like at this point almost all the underlying hardware and software should support it? It seems like the only argument for sticking with IPv4 is NAT, but I can't think of a technical reason we couldn't do NAT with IPv6?

I recently switch ISP and the new ISP gives you an IPv6 address and have their router just hand out IPv6 addresses on your LAN as well. It generally works really really well. The only weirdness I've seen is in Firefox when using DoH and IPv6. Sites like Google or Wikipedia just worked, while others simply doesn't and because it's DoH in the browser, you can't actually debug the issue all that well. I believe it may b…

> Why would you want to use NAT with IPv6 though?

I imagine it being far simpler for the average person to adopt IPv6 without much research if all of their current firewall rules, including port forwards, work exactly the same as they did with IPv4. You may not need those port forwards without NATs, but do you trust the firewalls on your servers to disallow accessing other ports from outside your local network?

Re: Tech CEO sentenced to 5 years in IP address scheme

#139

Post by nodesocket »

tlogan wrote: post #39
kstrauser wrote: post #9

The underlying crime was wire fraud, and it happened to be about acquiring IP addresses. He wasn’t prosecuted because he got too many, but for how he got them.

Yep. If he had real people or real companies buying these IP addresses (even if they are shell companies) he would be fine. Apparently he started like that but then he got greedy and said: fuck I will just invent some fake people. The actual criminal activity (fradulent affidavits, forged signatures) started in 2017.

I'm not clear why he needed to use fake names and forged signatures? Couldn't he just create legal LLC's in various states (Nevada is a good one) which don't expose the entities owners and use those to purchase the IPs from ARIN? Rinse and repeat.

Re: Tech CEO sentenced to 5 years in IP address scheme

#140

Post by hnlmorg »

PrivateButts wrote: post #99
lalith_c wrote: post #2

Move to ipv6 already

One complaint that I have about ipv6 and mac addresses is that they use hex separated by colons. Not only is it way longer than an ipv4 address, you can't rattle one off using a number pad. Back when I did full time IT, that sounds like a nightmare if in ipv6 land you have to enter addresses as commonly as you have to enter ipv4 addresses.

While I do agree with you, I do think we should be long past the point of needing to manually enter IP addresses. We have several good service discovery protocols, and DHCP and DNS, which are less great but still has pretty good tooling these days
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