Russian FSB 'protecting' Storm Worm gang
Prosecution on ice
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The creators of the Storm Worm botnet are known to US authorities but a lack of co-operation from their counterparts in St. Petersburg, Russia, is preventing action being taken.
St. Petersburg was the centre of the infamous Russian Business Network. It's also reckoned by some to be the city the Storm Worm (more properly Trojan) authors call home.
Dmitri Alperovitch director of intelligence analysis and hosted security at Secure Computing told The Washington Post that Russian President Vladimir Putin and political influence within the Federal Security Service (Russia's successor to the Soviet KGB) was hampering prosecution efforts. The implication is that elements of Russian intelligence agencies are protecting the city's cybercriminals.
"The right people now know who the Storm worm authors are," Alperovitch said. 'It's incredibly hard because a lot of the FSB leadership and Putin himself originate from there, where there are a great deal of people with connections in high places."
Other security experts reckon that the Storm Worm gang are based in Russia but have no real idea of their location, much less their identities. David Emm, senior technology consultant at Kaspersky Lab UK, said coding similarities and packing techniques used with the worm suggest the authors of the malware and Russian hackers known to have attacked local websites are one and the same. Kaspersky, like antivirus firm F-Secure, reckons that the Storm Worm gang is a multinational effort based in Russia.
"We don't know who they are," said F-Secure chief research officer Mikko Hyppönen, "but we believe it's a Russian gang with an American or several Americans helping them to build the social engineering messages and the websites they use." ®
COMMENTS
agreed with shubin
Especially considering the US is still the number one ejaculator of malware into the not-so-virgin-come-cheap-ho that is the internet today. i blame yankee military (that's right arpanet, i blame you creeper).
Straw man du jour
yep, Muslims and immigrants are so last week, let's blame the Russians. as Chris Rock said, "that train is never late!"
love that stuff, makes it so much easier to blame and hate the "right" people. i wonder if the Jews and blacks are next, will have to check the list, can't remember the correct order just now...
considering the problems Russia is dealing with at the moment (organized crime, massive corruption, poverty, disease, unrest in many countries along the southern border, NATO expansion in the periphery, fallout from US foreign policy in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and many many more), in addition to managing the largest country in the world (square mileage), i would guess that finding the Storm Trojan authors is pretty low on the list, and protecting them is even lower. if Storm is a problem in the West, so what? the FSB has more important (and far more urgent) things to worry about.
i'd like to see what proof they have, that the FSB would really waste time dealing with these guys at all.
and the thought of blocking communications is just silly, you really don't know how TCP/IP and routing works, do you? besides, all the Western companies (especially many of the banks) that have outsourced development to Russia (the quality of the work is better than what they get from India) will want a word with you about your great idea...
@Hate2Register
So "you" have the license of being the "good people" while them godless commie russkies are the "bad people" by default, huh?
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