Dutch police take down hornets' nest of DDoS botnets • Hacker News Board

Re: Dutch police take down hornets' nest of DDoS botnets

#51

Post by hobofan » Thu, Oct 03, 2019, 5:10 PM UTC

archi42 wrote: post #31

zaarn wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's mandatory if the newspaper want to continue being a respected newspaper. So for all intents and purposes it's mandatory.

I can second this. You don't read the full names of suspects (!) in a newspaper in Germany. I believe this is actually due to the law here (e.g. if they're innocent, their name is not ruined). That is somewhat relaxed, as long as they're not a public figure (e.g. no one would say "Angela M. is suspected to be a physicist" if it's about the German Chancellor) and as long as it's clear from the article that they're not…

"Proper" newspapers don't, but yellow press (e.g. BILD) which is consumed by a large chunk of the German population doesn't really care that much about preserving privacy or correctly reporting on conviction status.

Re: Dutch police take down hornets' nest of DDoS botnets

#52

Post by callalex » Thu, Oct 03, 2019, 5:21 PM UTC

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #45

grepthisab wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run a distributed system on AWS infrastructure. It's still distributed by all common usage of the word.

If your system goes down together with Amazon, it's not distributed, it just occupies several machines - a farm.

Yes but a Farm Systems Engineer is a very different job than a Distributed Systems Engineer.

Re: Dutch police take down hornets' nest of DDoS botnets

#53

Post by Havoc » Thu, Oct 03, 2019, 5:39 PM UTC

zelon88 wrote: post #47

KingMachiavelli wrote: post #44

Is it just me, or are the majority of raids of malware/botnet hosters typically in the EU? I mean just 6 days ago a raid was cunducted on a old NATO bunker in Germany. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21090549 Is it that it's easier to become a hosting provider there with more protections (rights) and/or does America/NA lack the legal authority/process to conduct as many raids. Obviously eastern Eurupe/Russia is…

I'm curious why Eastern Europe/Russia are the wild west of douchey internet behavior. I mean there are seemingly endless bulletproof hosting providers. Who wakes up in the morning with the ultimate goal of being slimy on purpose like that? And why are there so many of them concentrated in Russia/Eastern Europe?

It's a competitive advantage vs legit hosting companies that can be leveraged for profit.

Simple as that. If it pays well someone will do it, slimy or not.

Re: Dutch police take down hornets' nest of DDoS botnets

#54

Post by solotronics » Thu, Oct 03, 2019, 5:51 PM UTC

callalex wrote: post #52

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your system goes down together with Amazon, it's not distributed, it just occupies several machines - a farm.

Yes but a Farm Systems Engineer is a very different job than a Distributed Systems Engineer.

lol. I work down at the Cloud Farm.

Re: Dutch police take down hornets' nest of DDoS botnets

#55

Post by ChuckMcM » Thu, Oct 03, 2019, 5:52 PM UTC

zelon88 wrote: post #47

KingMachiavelli wrote: post #44

Is it just me, or are the majority of raids of malware/botnet hosters typically in the EU? I mean just 6 days ago a raid was cunducted on a old NATO bunker in Germany. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21090549 Is it that it's easier to become a hosting provider there with more protections (rights) and/or does America/NA lack the legal authority/process to conduct as many raids. Obviously eastern Eurupe/Russia is…

I'm curious why Eastern Europe/Russia are the wild west of douchey internet behavior. I mean there are seemingly endless bulletproof hosting providers. Who wakes up in the morning with the ultimate goal of being slimy on purpose like that? And why are there so many of them concentrated in Russia/Eastern Europe?

In talking with a guy that was trying to sell me data center space in a Ukranian data center, his pitch was that that as long as your activities targeted "western" countries you could host activities that more local data centers might disallow in their TOS.

He pointed out that they turned off the local DNS function when ever someone was in the building who wasn't a customer. I found that somewhat strange at first and then realized that it was essentially a "bell ringer" protocol for people who might want to wipe their servers in the event of people being there that didn't belong.

All in all, a very different way of operating.

Re: Dutch police take down hornets' nest of DDoS botnets

#56

Post by jascii » Thu, Oct 03, 2019, 6:09 PM UTC

hannob wrote: post #46

saag4dinner wrote: post #6

"hosting all sorts of badies, from phishing pages to vulnerability scanners, and from crypto-mining operations to malware repositories." Is crypto-mining now a bad thing or is this article leaving out some details that I'm missing?

It absolutely is a bad thing. Unfortunately it's not illegal.

Would you mind explaining that opinion?

Re: Dutch police take down hornets' nest of DDoS botnets

#57

Post by jascii » Thu, Oct 03, 2019, 6:20 PM UTC

botwriter wrote: post #3

If even Bulletproof hosts aren't safe why aren't malware authors using P2P infrastructure?

In order to keep a coherent network, most (all?) P2P infrastructure still requires some centralized resource to seed initial peers etc for a node. You would still have a single point of failure, if not for the network, at least for your control of it.

Re: Dutch police take down hornets' nest of DDoS botnets

#58

Post by IfOnlyYouKnew » Thu, Oct 03, 2019, 7:09 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #29

Why didn't their upstream provider just blackhole their IP ranges?

Because law enforcement tends to reach for the law as their tool of choice. And since crimes were committed, their goals include not just "stop it from happening again" but also "prosecute", which needs evidence that cannot be obtained by a routing patch.

Re: Dutch police take down hornets' nest of DDoS botnets

#59

Post by ryanlol » Thu, Oct 03, 2019, 7:27 PM UTC

KingMachiavelli wrote: post #44

Is it just me, or are the majority of raids of malware/botnet hosters typically in the EU? I mean just 6 days ago a raid was cunducted on a old NATO bunker in Germany. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21090549 Is it that it's easier to become a hosting provider there with more protections (rights) and/or does America/NA lack the legal authority/process to conduct as many raids. Obviously eastern Eurupe/Russia is…

Bandwidth tends to be cheaper in EU. This has nothing to do with legal protections and everything to do with operating costs.

>Obviously eastern Eurupe/Russia is the wild west

What? Maybe if you’re talking about the users, but definitely not true for hosts. And I definitely wouldn’t call any of the eastern EU states the “wild west”.

Re: Dutch police take down hornets' nest of DDoS botnets

#60

Post by Alupis » Thu, Oct 03, 2019, 7:27 PM UTC

mirimir wrote: post #27

pjc50 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check your local laws on cryptography and destruction of evidence before trying this. You may still be legally obliged to decrypt the material or go to jail.

True. Last I read, that ex cop is still locked up in Philadelphia, for contempt. They don't believe that he forgot his passphrase. But parent was talking about hosting servers for a client. If the client executed that command, I don't see how the provider could be responsible. The client could be. But they'd need to extradite him, from Russia, which might not be so easy, these days.

Sometimes going to jail for obstruction/destruction of evidence is a better option than the alternative...