'Bulletproof' ISP for crimeware gangs knocked offline
Zeus-friendly PROXIEZ goes MIA
One of the internet's most resilient and crimeware-friendly networks was knocked offline Friday after the plug was pulled on its upstream service provider, security watchers said.
Russia-based PROXIEZ-NET lost its connection to the internet at about 3 am California time, according to Zeus Tracker, a website that monitors the status of internet service providers used to control PCs infected by the notorious Zeus crimeware package. Before it was disconnected, the "bulletproof" provider hosted 13 known Zeus command and control channels, making it the most Zeus-friendly ISP, Zeus Tracker statistics show.
Zeus Tracker leaders don't yet know the reason for the outage, but one of them pointed out to The Register that PROXIEZ-NET's upstream provider, DIGERNET, has also had its internet connection severed. Classless Inter-Domain Routing records show it being unceremoniously withdrawn from internet routing tables, leaving its downstream node unable to communicate.
PROXIEZ-NET has been widely accused as being a haven for purveyors of crimeware. On Tuesday, the network was added to the real-time block list maintained by Spamhaus. On Thursday night, DIGERNET was removed from the same list.
It remains to be seen how big a disruption the disconnection will have on Zeus crime gangs, which have come to regard such outages as a cost of doing business. In March, the takedown of 100 servers used to operate Zeus-related botnets turned out to be a short-lived victory for white hats. Within a couple days, their ISP was able to find a new upstream provider, allowing many stranded Zeus botnets to find their way home again.
Indeed, at time of writing, vitamelatonin.biz and a handful of other dodgy looking domains continued to map to IP addresses in PROXIEZ-NET's netblock, DIG lookup searches showed. The domains may die out over time, but a Zeus Tracker leader also held out the possibility that redundancies built into Zeus botnets would allow them to connect over alternate channels.
The disruption is nonetheless a black eye for PROXIEZ-NET, which has billed itself as a bulletproof provider that is immune from service glitches and law enforcement-driven takedowns. Representatives from the ISP didn't respond to an email seeking comment for this article. ®
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COMMENTS
Ofcourse they didn't reply to emails requesting comment
Their internet is down!
no global routing table
There is no global routing table. Every router has and regularly updates its own viewpoint of which neighbouring node to go through in order to forward to a particular address range. Each router also regularly advertises to its neighbours the address ranges it can help forward the packets it receives.
The Net was designed this way in order to avoid single points of failure, as was the telephone network before it.
There is a centralised system of address block allocation, analogous to the allocation of telephone dialling country codes. To find out more about that a good starting point is the Wikipedia article on Regional Internet Registries http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Internet_registry .
Hmmm....
I may be a little ignorant here, but who manages the global routing table?
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