14 DAY TRIAL // A district court judge has ordered Pricewert, a company incorporated in Oregon, to cease all operations after the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed a complaint against it for knowingly and actively collaborating with cybercrooks, to whom it offered various Internet services.
Pricewert, which is headquartered in Belize City, operates as an Internet Service Provider business under various aliases including Triple Fiber Network (3FN), APS Telecom, APX Telecom, and APS Communications. In its complaint (PDF) against Pricewert, the FTC alleges that the company "recruits and colludes with criminals seeking to distribute illegal, malicious and harmful electronic content via the Internet."
The illegal content includes viruses, trojans, phishing and spam websites, botnet control and command servers, as well as illegal explicit adult material involving children. "Pricewert offers these criminals a full service Internet hosting facility that welcomes content no legitimate Internet Service Provider would ever willingly host," the FTC notes.
In addition to offering hosting services, company representatives are being accused of actually assisting cybercrooks in configuring and deploying botnets (armies of infected computers). Such activity is revealed by logs of ICQ chats in Russian between 3FN's Head of Programming Department or Senior Project Manager and some of the company's shady customers.
These logs were obtained from the servers belonging to McColo, another notorious ISP shut down in November 2008, suggesting a connection between the two companies. Part of the vast amount of evidence submitted by the FTC was provided by independent security researchers, law enforcement agents, government agency workers and security professionals.
In this respect, the complaint extensively mentions Special Agent Sean Zadig from the Computer Crime Division of NASA's Office of Inspector General; Gary Warner, director of research in computer forensics at University of Alabama at Birmingham; Sarah Ohlsen, supervisor of the Exploited Children Division at The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children; Steve Linford, founder of the The Spambaus Project; Andre' DiMino, co-founder and director of The Shadowserver Foundation; and Dean Turner, director of Symantec's Global intelligence Network.
After considering the complaint, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, San Jose Division, granted the motion for a temporary restraining against Pricewert and ordered all of its upstream providers to immediately cut it off the Internet in order to prevent the cybercriminal gangs from moving their illegal content. Additionally, the company's assets have also been frozen in order to cover potential damages, if proven.