The US Federal Trade Commission said Belize-based 3FN aided gangs that ran botnets, carried out phishing attacks and traded in images of child abuse.
The operators of 3FN must also pay back $1.08m (£750,000 ) this is the amount they are suposed to of made.
While I'm alwasy happy to hear a crook get busted in the malware ring I find it still very lacking. The FTC first started going after these guys in June 2009. It took a whole year for this company to be taken down! Seriously these guys were involved with images of children and phishing atacks as well as malware and it took a whole entire year to stop all this.
I'm for freedom of the internet as much as the next person and I do not belive in censor ship of the internet. However these people clearly created a crime. When someone creates a crime they should be punished in a quick timely manner. One that is as blantent as this should be very open and shut but as we can tell from this example it took a whole year to close the book on this.
In particular, said the FTC, the net firm worked with fraudsters who run botnets and helped them steal data by seeding hijacked computers with keyloggers. It maintained a library of more than 4500 malicious programs that could pilfer data from hijacked PCs.
In June last year, the FTC used an injunction to cut 3FN off from other hosting providers and sever its connections to the net.
Now the FTC has gone a step further and won a court order that will see the company stop trading and its hardware confiscated. The FBI has been ordered to carry out the shut down and seizure operation.
It is nice to see that the FTC got an injunction to cut off this company from hosting providers but too often the sites just come back up with a different domain and are right back in the thick of things.
This should be an eye opener for every computer user out there. You need to be the one who takes responsability for your computer. You need to keep all your programs patched and up to date and have a good antivirus client to protect yourself. Common sense plays a big role in this.
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