Live data from Hacker News

Prosecutors allege Micfo obtained 800k IPv4 addresses illegally

wsj.com

1–10 of 82 posts

Re: Prosecutors allege Micfo obtained 800k IPv4 addresses illegally

#4
Hmm.

I "obtained" 2^32 IPv4 addresses pretty easily; not sure if it's legitimate or not:

  for addr in range(2**32):
    print('.'.join([str(addr >> (i 
Edit: Well, this was unpopular. In case it's too subtle, my point is that the title is terrible.

Re: Prosecutors allege Micfo obtained 800k IPv4 addresses illegally

#5

I can come up with at least 3 distinct meanings for “amassed VPN clients” and I’m still not 100% sure which is correct in this context. I take it that clients here refers to “paying customers”?

> He said Micfo provides a legitimate service to VPNs, adding that whatever his customers or their users do through Micfo servers is none of his business.

From what I understand he was attributed many IPs by creating shell companies and rented these IPs to VPN providers.

Re: Prosecutors allege Micfo obtained 800k IPv4 addresses illegally

#6

I can come up with at least 3 distinct meanings for “amassed VPN clients” and I’m still not 100% sure which is correct in this context. I take it that clients here refers to “paying customers”?

> He said Micfo provides a legitimate service to VPNs, adding that whatever his customers or their users do through Micfo servers is none of his business. From what I understand he was attributed many IPs by creating shell companies and rented these IPs to VPN providers.

Why pursue him? What he's done has been done by many others since years.

Re: Prosecutors allege Micfo obtained 800k IPv4 addresses illegally

#7
The writing is quite confusing in trying to explain things but the gist of it appears to be that the person in question (1) applied for IP addresses through numerous companies created just for this purpose in order to bypass ARIN's restriction on the number of addresses it was willing to allocate to a single entity, and (2) made the obtained IP address ranges available to serve as VPN endpoints, so that "huge amount of traffic—some of it illicit or criminal—passed through its computer servers but wasn't traceable to the true originators."

He did keep track though of which VPN operator used which range at any given time, so perhaps the "true originators" could be traceable after all, assuming the VPN owners were willing to co-operate. In any case, he is only being prosecuted for (1), and the immediate reason for this is that a couple of US politicians were hacked with attacks originating from these addresses.

Re: Prosecutors allege Micfo obtained 800k IPv4 addresses illegally

#8

The writing is quite confusing in trying to explain things but the gist of it appears to be that the person in question (1) applied for IP addresses through numerous companies created just for this purpose in order to bypass ARIN's restriction on the number of addresses it was willing to allocate to a single entity, and (2) made the obtained IP address ranges available to serve as VPN endpoints, so that "huge amount…

A prosecution seems a bit over the top for this... Setting up multiple companies to meet some rule isnt against said rule. And anyway, it's a company policy not the law.

Re: Prosecutors allege Micfo obtained 800k IPv4 addresses illegally

#9
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He said Micfo provides a legitimate service to VPNs, adding that whatever his customers or their users do through Micfo servers is none of his business. From what I understand he was attributed many IPs by creating shell companies and rented these IPs to VPN providers.

Why pursue him? What he's done has been done by many others since years.

I'd guess he pissed off some important people... If this prosecution doesn't succeed, you can bet every tax return of his for the last 20 years will suddenly be randomly checked, and he'll be prosecuted for claiming a Starbucks coffee as an expense during a business meeting when he actually took half the coffee away after the meeting making it not an allowable expense, and therefore technically fraud.

Re: Prosecutors allege Micfo obtained 800k IPv4 addresses illegally

#10

I can come up with at least 3 distinct meanings for “amassed VPN clients” and I’m still not 100% sure which is correct in this context. I take it that clients here refers to “paying customers”?

> He said Micfo provides a legitimate service to VPNs, adding that whatever his customers or their users do through Micfo servers is none of his business. From what I understand he was attributed many IPs by creating shell companies and rented these IPs to VPN providers.

A former employer used to rent IPs, the person renting ranges had different companies own each block to reduce abuse report blast radius. We also owned a ton of IPs and never really had to prove utilization when requesting new blocks from ARIN as of 2011.
Post reply on HN