Child Pornography Hosting Service Goes Offline

The Russian Business Network (also known as RBN) went offline yesterday but nobody knows an official reason for the outage. A post on the Trend Micro blog informs that the service became unavailable yesterday at 7 PM PST and at this time its IP addresses are still unreachable. The RBN has always been famous for the illegal content it provides including child pornography, phishing or malware files as an article published on Wikipedia states. Trend Micro adds that RBN is one of the services which provides access to browser exploits, the recently reported Adobe Acrobat Reader vulnerability being one of the glitches supposed to be exploited by the members.

"Yesterday, the infamous Russian Business Network (RBN) dropped out of the Internet at around 7 PM PST. Since then, IP addresses of RBN can no longer be reached because there is no routing for them any longer. It could be that the upstream providers who provided RBN with Internet connectivity may have terminated their services to their problematic customer temporarily or (hopefully) even permanently. Trend Micro will continue to closely monitor whether RBN remains down," Feike Hacquebord from Trend Micro wrote.

In the recent period, numerous services and websites doubted to be serving illegal content went offline without too many notices. BitTorrent pages for instance were some of the most affected websites in the recent period. One by one, popular BitTorrent links including IsoHunt, Demonoid and some others were closed due to the illegal content published on them. But this time, nobody knows for sure the reason for RBN's outage. The experts think the network will come back very soon as they are fastly looking for new providers able to keep their services up and available.

"That RBN, currently, has no Internet connectivity means that the Web is a somewhat safer place today. Unfortunately, this may not be for long. RBN may find new upstream providers. In recent weeks, moreover, Trend Micro has seen equivalents of RBN pop up in Turkey and Taiwan," the Trend Micro official continued.

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