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pocksuppet 4 hours ago [-]
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 Germany where I lost several social media accounts because my email service provider (pissmail) went to jail because someone signed up for his service and sent spam.
orbital-decay 3 hours ago [-]
>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.
MuffinFlavored 24 minutes ago [-]
> email service provider (pissmail)
I'm sorry this happened to you.
nalekberov 4 hours ago [-]
Any source to back up your claims? Otherwise it seemed pretty much a conspiracy theory to me.
consp 4 hours ago [-]
The company inherited all their customers and equipment from a sanctioned company (according to the Dutch news report). Should be enough for most people.
nalekberov 36 minutes ago [-]
Sanctioned company != works for the government.
chatmasta 3 hours ago [-]
That just means the sanctioned company was selling to sanctioned entities, not that it was only selling to them.
l23k4 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
locknitpicker 3 hours ago [-]
> The article literally has photos of their english-language customer-facing communications.
Providing a website is hardly evidence they were a legitimate business.
l23k4 2 hours ago [-]
>Providing a website is hardly evidence they were a legitimate business.
legitimate business? Of course they weren't. This is a bulletproof hoster specializing in offering hosting to people doing illegal stuff.
That's not OPs claim.
You can go on the website and rent a server for a couple of dollars in cryptocurrency right now, you don't have to work for the Russian government to do so.
11 minutes ago [-]
efitz 6 hours ago [-]
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.
Aurornis 6 hours ago [-]
I watched the downfall and eventual jailing of someone who had a great job, career, and family after he started getting involved in cybercrime.
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.
He got caught through a mistake that was really dumb in retrospect. I think he believed his intellectual superiority combined with the stupidity of others so much that eventually he couldn’t imagine anyone catching him.
kspacewalk2 5 hours ago [-]
>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.
meindnoch 3 hours ago [-]
That's just what 40 years of communism does to a society.
elmomle 3 hours ago [-]
If communism is the cause, then why would this same mentality be such a massive problem in America?
locknitpicker 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
RRWagner 1 hours ago [-]
Well, that answers the America question.
kirubakaran 4 hours ago [-]
Let's not generalize, even if you feel like you can say that because you're a member of a group you're generalizing. It's unfair to most of the people in any group being generalized.
quantummagic 4 hours ago [-]
Stereotypes exist for a reason. It's exhausting having to address this concern trolling every single time they're mentioned. Nobody thinks everyone in the group conforms to the stereotype. And they certainly don't need your white knighting.
kirubakaran 4 hours ago [-]
It isn't "concern trolling" or "white knighting" to call out racism or bigotry, and expect some decency in the discussion. If it is "exhausting" for you to be propagating unfair stereotypes, perhaps stop your bad behavior?
JCTheDenthog 3 hours ago [-]
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.
kspacewalk2 43 minutes ago [-]
Now I'm confused whether my observing patterns of behaviour and recurring beliefs clustered among people from my own part of the world are in fact racism or bigotry. Am I being indecent? Am I self-hating? Are others tolerhating? I only wish some white night would unambiguously tut-tut me or else give me a pass.
hermannj314 3 hours ago [-]
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 goodness-of-fit test.
Swizec 3 hours ago [-]
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
kspacewalk2 46 minutes ago [-]
Re-read my comment as it is written and note that my observation does not generalize.
KellyCriterion 4 hours ago [-]
sounds like Markus Braun & Jan Marsalek / Wirecard, the fraudsters :-D
cm2012 4 hours ago [-]
Sounds like Breaking Bad
redsocksfan45 5 hours ago [-]
[dead]
thewebguyd 5 hours ago [-]
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), it's not hard to see why its tempting to go the cybercrime route.
locknitpicker 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
goobatrooba 7 minutes ago [-]
I think s/he meant that if you earn 30k it's easy to be tempted by crime because the numbers are big. What night not tempt a Google engineer might tempt a telecoms infrastructure key from Anytinytown, Moldova/Romania/...
That said I don't think there are many good software engineers that earn less than that in Western Europe. Net maybe, but certainly not gross, and if it's net that covers anything from pension security to healthcare, meaning you can live a decent life in most places.
r_lee 4 hours ago [-]
why is this downvoted?
KellyCriterion 4 hours ago [-]
...because on HN, experiences which somehow contradict the perspective when salaries are highly varying across countries, esp. when someone decides to pick an explicit example, which, even if it shows the truth, is against the base-assumption of the reader of a comment.
To put it somehow dimplomatic :-D
KellyCriterion 31 minutes ago [-]
OP: So it was clear, I will get downvoted too :-D
parliament32 5 hours ago [-]
Imagine working for an organization where 1) cybersecurity is actually the #1 priority, ahead of "shareholder value" and all the other gobblygook, 2) you get to design systems where you actually have to assume that every other entity is malicious (not the usual carve-outs like "oh yeah we do zero trust.. but our entire management plane is Azure-managed it's unavoidable"), 3) your budget is effectively unlimited, and 4) you get paid several factors more than you would in private industry.
r_lee 6 hours ago [-]
> The people involved definitely have the skills to be profitable at legitimate work; it just puzzles me that they choose to support criminals.
I don't think it's that easy to go legit. having a tech job nowadays is already a luxury
derefr 3 hours ago [-]
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.)
fancythat 4 hours ago [-]
Because they cannot be profitable. Job market is not the same on both ends. If you are east European and you try to get a job in an international corporation, the in all cases offer salaries adjusted for regional averages, unless you are willing to reallocate. Only few startups and FAANG like companies, often compensation in line what is received in the western world.
And there is also a thrill of doing it, which other guys already mentioned.
davidwritesbugs 4 hours ago [-]
In a previous life I've employed contractors and software engineers to run a criminal website. Motivations for my guys were that it was well paid work that was technically challenging in order to evade enforcement agencies, and was 'fun' in that respect; they were "sticking it to than man (my service was regarded as moral by all my users & others); and there wasn't so much work about that they could pick and choose; lastly, I was a good employer because I had to be!!
sandeepkd 3 hours ago [-]
If we use one of the comments from here that it was done at the behest of some government then its more like the offensive team of a legitimate government. Pretty much every thing can be colored grey that way and one just needs to find people that they can persuade or convince for their cause.
thrownthatway 2 hours ago [-]
Some people provide services exclusively, or partially, to government(s).
Crime really isn’t that much different.
amelius 5 hours ago [-]
Cybersecurity is always last on the budget list. It is not easy to make money working in cybersecurity.
The only upside here is that criminals will (through legislation) eventually force companies to invest more.
SoftTalker 5 hours ago [-]
Some people are just born into it. Mafia families, etc. There were some very smart people in the American mob, running scams that were immensely profitable. Eventually they get caught though, and with the ease and pervasivness of electronic surveillance today, it's pretty much impossible to do it anymre at least if you're anywhere where the authorities care about it (edit to add: and aren't in on it).
seibelj 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
6 hours ago [-]
2 hours ago [-]
dist-epoch 5 hours ago [-]
You fail to take into account the ideological angle.
Some people are ready to die for their beliefs. Others just to run businesses supporting their causes.
3 of the 4 persons named have russian links (a large number of Moldovan citizens are ethnic russians).
spwa4 5 hours ago [-]
> Some people are ready to die for their beliefs.
Really? Because while I've seen this, rarely, in individuals. In many cases once you start tracing money the amounts involved in many "die for their beliefs" situations is absurd. Terrorism, for example.
cpursley 4 hours ago [-]
What point are you trying to make other than bigotry? Ethic Russians are not the only Eastern Europeans perpetuating cyber crime. Anyways, Nesterenko is a Ukrainian surname - at least get your racism correct.
consumer451 3 hours ago [-]
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?
Cider9986 34 minutes ago [-]
That's where the servers are. See all the tor nodes in Netherlands. They aren't actually in the Netherlands.
mvdwoord 3 hours ago [-]
High bandwidth and (relatively) low sentencing would be my guess..
0xAstro 7 hours ago [-]
> Stark Industries Solutions
jarvis, whats the status of my dutch servers
5 hours ago [-]
debarshri 4 hours ago [-]
Those who are curious about notorious data centers, please see Cyberbunker [1]. I think conceptually it is cool. Also in the netherlands.
> those sanctions failed to target Stark’s remaining connection to the Internet — an Internet service provider based in the Netherlands called MIRhosting.
The fuck, i walk past the office of mirhosting every day
analog8374 6 hours ago [-]
It would be nice if they named/prosecuted the people who paid them to perform the attacks.
dist-epoch 5 hours ago [-]
The FSB? What are you going to do about that. Russia shot down an airliner full of Netherlands citizens and there were no repercussions.
parineum 5 hours ago [-]
Law enforcement doesn't typically talk about ongoing investigations.
ziofill 5 hours ago [-]
Maybe it's because I haven't had my coffee yet, but I swear my brain read: "Neanderthals Seize 800 Servers"
3 hours ago [-]
DeathArrow 7 hours ago [-]
After reading the article I am not sure what crime did they commit in the Netherlands.
msh 7 hours ago [-]
The article spells it out clearly: charging them with violating sanctions law by directly or indirectly making economic resources available to EU-sanctioned entities.
htx80nerd 1 hours ago [-]
>"making economic resources available to EU-sanctioned entities."
this is very vague
5 hours ago [-]
bunbun69 6 hours ago [-]
I feel like you’re only asking this because you disagree with their charges, not because you genuinely have no clue why they’re arrested.
binaryturtle 6 hours ago [-]
> …charging them with violating sanctions law by directly or indirectly making economic resources available to EU-sanctioned entities…
I guess that's why.
SecretDreams 7 hours ago [-]
> charging them with violating sanctions law by directly or indirectly making economic resources available to EU-sanctioned entities.
Did you read this part?
DonHopkins 6 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
runtime_terror 3 hours ago [-]
I'm I the only one that read "Neanderthal Seizes 800 Servers..."?
Unlike in Germany where I lost several social media accounts because my email service provider (pissmail) went to jail because someone signed up for his service and sent spam.
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.
I'm sorry this happened to you.
Providing a website is hardly evidence they were a legitimate business.
legitimate business? Of course they weren't. This is a bulletproof hoster specializing in offering hosting to people doing illegal stuff.
That's not OPs claim.
You can go on the website and rent a server for a couple of dollars in cryptocurrency right now, you don't have to work for the Russian government to do so.
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.
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.
He got caught through a mistake that was really dumb in retrospect. I think he believed his intellectual superiority combined with the stupidity of others so much that eventually he couldn’t imagine anyone catching him.
I sadly see this pattern of thinking far more often than I want to in my fellow eastern Europeans.
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.
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 goodness-of-fit test.
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
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), it's not hard to see why its tempting to go the cybercrime route.
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.
That said I don't think there are many good software engineers that earn less than that in Western Europe. Net maybe, but certainly not gross, and if it's net that covers anything from pension security to healthcare, meaning you can live a decent life in most places.
To put it somehow dimplomatic :-D
I don't think it's that easy to go legit. having a tech job nowadays is already a luxury
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.)
And there is also a thrill of doing it, which other guys already mentioned.
Crime really isn’t that much different.
The only upside here is that criminals will (through legislation) eventually force companies to invest more.
Some people are ready to die for their beliefs. Others just to run businesses supporting their causes.
3 of the 4 persons named have russian links (a large number of Moldovan citizens are ethnic russians).
Really? Because while I've seen this, rarely, in individuals. In many cases once you start tracing money the amounts involved in many "die for their beliefs" situations is absurd. Terrorism, for example.
What is it about the Netherlands that makes them so attractive to these people?
jarvis, whats the status of my dutch servers
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberBunker
The fuck, i walk past the office of mirhosting every day
this is very vague
I guess that's why.
Did you read this part?
Would have loved to read that article.