Russian Hacker Gang Vanishes Again

The shadowy hacker and malware hosting network that only recently fled Russia to set up operations in China has now pulled the plug there and vanished yet again. An analyst at VeriSign’s iDefense Labs unit said iDefense had tracked RBN’s migration earlier in the week from servers based in Russia to ones running in China, after obtaining at least seven net blocks of Chinese IP addresses. As of Wednesday, RBN controlled 5,120 IP addresses assigned to Chinese service providers; known RBN clients were even seen using those addresses that day. But with its China move putting the spotlights of the media and the security community on the organization, RBN suddenly went offline on Thursday. They severed connections to six of the seven net blocks on November 8, the analyst said. RBN as a single organisation may be dead and gone; it may even now be breaking up into smaller pieces farmed out to multiple countries’ Internet infrastructures — via Slashdot