Huygens if true: Dutch police break up bulletproof hosting outfit and kill Mirai botnet Dutch police said in a translated news release that they have busted a local 'bulletproof' server hosting operation in a major takedown that also nabbed a pair of Mirai botnet operators. The Netherlands' National Criminal Investigation Department and National Cyber Security Center operated jointly to track down and seize five …
I always thought those types of services were only in countries that were not interested in proper law enforcement. Poor places that have other priorities than worrying about a bunch of bytes only affecting people far away.
Seems to me that local crime in Europe (or at least, in the Netherlands) would do better to choose a bulletproof server in a country that will leave the hosting provider alone. It's on the Internet anyway, who cares about the location of the server ?
In any case, good on those cops. Hopefully they will get data from those servers that will serve to bust other operations as well.
There's also the whole thing of dealing with locals vs dealing with foreign types (better the devil you know).
Yes. If you're doing something profitably criminal, would you really want to do it on a machine where the local equivalent of the mafia has console access?
Yes but:
Service located in shithole: White hats pay off right people, service goes down with extreme prejudice the next day and its operators are never seen or heard of again.
Service located in western democracy: White hats apply for court order to cease. Many months of legal wrangling later, service is taken down in police raid. Operators pick up fine and possibly a short stay in prison.
If your local cop shop can’t be bothered to take your complaint - as fully documented as it may be - to a prosecutor, and the hosting company redirects their postmaster and noc emails to /dev/null, you are basically stuffed until a public prosecutor decides to take action and seize their assets for analysis and freeze their peering agreements. How long will it take for your complaint to the police or direct to the public prosecutors office to go from level 1 to level 4 where the action happens ? Not quick, and a lot of duplicate requests come in may case the escalation to go faster, but noncertainty on that...
"countries that were not interested in proper law enforcement"
So, The Netherlands it is.
Citizens in The Netherlands hardly bother to report crime anymore, as they know it's useless. The police actively discourages people from reporting crime. Most reports do no lead to investigations. Most investigations do not lead to arrests. A lot of arrests do not lead to convictions. If convicted, sentences are low. Standard sentencing for murder is eighteen years, but everyone gets a free one third deduction, so in twelve years a murderer is free again.
And if sentenced, not showing up for incarceration is a viable option: at present there are more people convicted to jail sentences out and about than actually locked up.
https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/921983/netherlands-holland-narco-state-police-association-organised-crime-drugs-gang-underworld
Well sorry if I could not immediately find an artiicle from The Grauniad.
If there are any factual errors in the article I'll be happy to hear it.
Are all the downvotes just because I link to the wrong newspaper, or do you just downvote because you refuse to believe the situation is that bad?
I can provide more politically correct links, but they are all in Dutch.
"So, bulletproof servers aren't just running inside Kevlar cases then?"
There was an another bulletproof server operation busted just the other day that was not only bulletproof but could probably withstand some bomb and missle strikes as it was built in an old NATO bunker:
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/09/german-police-seize-bulletproof-hosting-data-center-in-former-nato-bunker/
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