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Netherlands Seizes 800 Servers, Arrests 2 for Aiding Cyberattacks

krebsonsecurity.com

51–60 of 114 posts

Re: Netherlands Seizes 800 Servers, Arrests 2 for Aiding Cyberattacks

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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I don't think a person saying Eastern European are observed doing something more than expected is inherently racist. It is a claim he either does or doesn't have evidence for. If he made the claim with insufficient evidence or made the claim in contradiction of the evidence, then it becomes racist, but I don't think making the observation and doing the calculation is the racist part. It is a simple chi-squared goodne…

I’m eastern-ish european, is it even racist to say that tech talent in the region is through the roof but for various accidents of history, the best opportunities available to talented people are in cybercrime (both sides)?

Not everyone has a hundred tech unicorns in their back yard. I think my country (Slovenia) produced one in its entire history so far and even that was mostly in the US

Re: Netherlands Seizes 800 Servers, Arrests 2 for Aiding Cyberattacks

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>As far as I can make sense of it, he enjoyed the thrill of feeling superior to others: Evading the law, exploiting people who viewed as stupid, and enriching himself in the process. I sadly see this pattern of thinking far more often than I want to in my fellow eastern Europeans.

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If communism is the cause, then why would this same mentality be such a massive problem in America?

Re: Netherlands Seizes 800 Servers, Arrests 2 for Aiding Cyberattacks

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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Your comment assumes, a priori, that the stereotypes are in fact "unfair". I don't know enough about cybercrime rates per capita amongst Eastern Europeans vs. other populations to be able to say if it is actually an unfair stereotype, but it is an indisputable fact (supported by virtually every jurisdiction that tracks crime rates by things like national origin, ethnicity, etc.) that there are population level differences in crime rates.

Re: Netherlands Seizes 800 Servers, Arrests 2 for Aiding Cyberattacks

#55

When I was learning some homelab stuff, and was setting up pfSense, I was able to see the geos of all the scans/attacks on my home internet IP. I was surprised to see that Netherlands was up there with Russia and China in volume. They all got geo blocked. What is it about the Netherlands that makes them so attractive to these people?

High bandwidth and (relatively) low sentencing would be my guess..

Re: Netherlands Seizes 800 Servers, Arrests 2 for Aiding Cyberattacks

#56
post #44

We should note these are not even slightly legitimate hosting companies, lest anyone worry too much about their non-KYC offshore servers. These aren't hosting companies that ask little, they are just directly front companies for Russian intelligence, owned by members of Russian intelligence, they don't do anything else, they don't provide hosting service to regular people even if you want it (I have tried). Unlike in…

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> The article literally has photos of their english-language customer-facing communications.

Providing a website is hardly evidence they were a legitimate business.

Re: Netherlands Seizes 800 Servers, Arrests 2 for Aiding Cyberattacks

#57
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

If communism is the cause, then why would this same mentality be such a massive problem in America?

> If communism is the cause, then why would this same mentality be such a massive problem in America?

By communism I don't think people talk about the philosophical basis of an idealized society, but the totalitarian regime that oppresses a society and keeps the working class constantly in survival mode under the risk of losing it all.

Re: Netherlands Seizes 800 Servers, Arrests 2 for Aiding Cyberattacks

#58
post #10

I’ve been on the defender side of security my whole career. I know in some markets crime pays more than legitimate work, but it never ceases to amaze me how much thought, effort, planning, and engineering goes into providing infrastructure IT services for cybercriminals. The people involved definitely have the skills to be profitable at legitimate work; it just puzzles me that they choose to support criminals.

I wouldn't advise thinking of it as "providing infrastructure IT services to cybercriminals", as if these people are primarily IT people, running primarily infrastructure, who just happen to favor this audience.

I would rather advise thinking of these efforts as various cybercriminal groups going through the schlep of setting up their own backend IT infrastructure for their own use (because they couldn't find anyone to host them); and then, with built infra in hand, either:

1. realizing that their own needs were emblematic of a more-general unmet market demand for "don't ask, don't tell" hosting, and so branching out into hosting as a secondary business;

2. taking the charade of a hosting company they made up when e.g. registering for an ASN, and deciding that the more real they make that charade, the more it protects them; and so slapping together a facade of a hosting site (that serves no real customers and has no real control-plane);

3. or deciding that having real customers with actual legitimate traffic coming from their ASN further legitimizes them (and makes other ASNs more wary to just block them wholesale), and so actually standing up the facilities of your average VPS provider on some single sad box somewhere — probably running some turn-key IaaS appliance (usually not OpenStack, more likely some shoddy old thing they bought on a cybercrime marketplace);

4. or (and I think this is the most common route) chatting with cybercriminal friends of theirs, and those friends hitting them up for hosting when they realize that they've actually built something out for themselves; and this gradually just evolving into a de-facto hosting arm of the business (as they accept more of these "high-touch" word-of-mouth customers; eventually begin to feel burdened by manually configuring their systems to accommodate these customers; and so begin to automate things.)

Re: Netherlands Seizes 800 Servers, Arrests 2 for Aiding Cyberattacks

#59

We should note these are not even slightly legitimate hosting companies, lest anyone worry too much about their non-KYC offshore servers. These aren't hosting companies that ask little, they are just directly front companies for Russian intelligence, owned by members of Russian intelligence, they don't do anything else, they don't provide hosting service to regular people even if you want it (I have tried). Unlike in…

>they don't provide hosting service to regular people even if you want it (I have tried)

That doesn't sound right. I used PQ.Hosting once when I needed a quick temporary VPS, just like many other legitimate users. Yes they never asked much, but they also used to ban users left and right even for torrenting, so it wasn't bulletproof in any meaningful sense. I'm sure they were into shady stuff though, since their IP quality used to be absolute crap, but they did provide legitimate services as well.

Re: Netherlands Seizes 800 Servers, Arrests 2 for Aiding Cyberattacks

#60
post #10

I’ve been on the defender side of security my whole career. I know in some markets crime pays more than legitimate work, but it never ceases to amaze me how much thought, effort, planning, and engineering goes into providing infrastructure IT services for cybercriminals. The people involved definitely have the skills to be profitable at legitimate work; it just puzzles me that they choose to support criminals.

It's not easy to go legit, especially in today's job market, depending on where you live in the world also. The US is unique with its high salaries for tech work (on the lower end of those of high salaries is pure ops work like this though). If you're in a country where the average sysadmin salary is substantially lower (to pick on Eastern Europe for a minute, you're looking at the equivalent of ~$30-35k USD/year), i…

> to pick on Eastern Europe for a minute, you're looking at the equivalent of ~$30-35k USD/year

This is a disingenuous claim. Not only are there software engineers in rich western European countries that in absolute terms earn less than that but also your east European software engineer still earns multiple times their country's average salary.

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