Minister: No Internet ‘Kill Switch’ for Australia

The Australian government does not support and will not participate in actions similar to the Egyptian government, which shut down Internet access to prevent protesters from communicating with others and the outside world, an Australian official has said.

Speaking at the launch of a new HP data center in Sydney, Australian Communications Minister Stephen…

Crimeware Hosting ISP Taken Out

Ukrainian PegasusHosting, a crimeware friendly ISP, has been partially taken-down by one of its upstream providers.

The ISP, known for hosting phishing mule scams and other crimeware, has had a significant portion of its IP addresses null routed, according to dynamoo.com, a security blog.

“Hosted web sites include fake pharmacies, fake job sites, hacking, porn and what appear to be fake dating sites,” according to dynamoo. “Blocking the…

Spammers to Pay $2.6 million

An Internet service provider (ISP) was recently awarded $2.6 million in restitution as the result of a lawsuit filed against a company that sent out 25,000 spam messages.

Asis Internet Services, a small ISP, filed the lawsuit against the principles of Find a Quote. Judge Elizabeth D. Laporte of the US District Court in Northern California awarded Asis $2.56 million saying that the spammers used automatic script to send…

ISP Set Alight After Crack Down

Hosting.ua, an ISP in the Ukraine, was the victim of a fire late last month after it cracked down on cyber crime. On March 27, the ISP was raked by fire which caused severe damage and forced it to go offline.

HostExploit.com, a website that tracks crimeware distribution, ranked Hosting.ua as fourth in the world for hosting malware and spam. However, in the past few months, the ISP has worked…

Cleaning Botnets the Japanese Way

Botnets are an increasing problem in the Internet community and will likely become even more problematic once Africa (reputed to have the largest number of infected computers) gets widespread access to broadband. The Japanese have taken an interesting approach to combating botnets, networks of infected computers that can be controlled remotely for nefarious purposes, working with ISPs in an attempt to clean computers that become infected.

The Cyber…

Security Researchers Go on Offensive

A security firm and ISPs have colluded to take down the command and control servers of the Lethic botnet, according to an article on The Register.  Neustar, a security research firm, along with cooperation from ISPs, were able to attack the servers of the Lethic botnet, which was used in distributing spam.

This is the third major assault against spammers by security research firms in the past year. Cyber…

British ISP Hit by DDoS from Latvia

Internet Service Provider (ISP) Vispa was downed for approximately 12 hours late last week by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack emanating from within Latvia. While internet service was available to customers after 12 hours, the phone service was still affected late Friday.

Vispa commercial director Adam Binks said”As a result of a major denial of service attack on our network we suffered a severe outage between 1am and…