In an unprecedented case, the Federal Trade Commission stepped in last Tuesday and shut down a web hosting provider in California.
Despite much positive press and a relatively long-standing history as a reputable web hosting services provider based in Oregon, Triple Fiber Network (DBA 3fn.net and Pricewert) was actually a cybercrime hub with principals and staff largely based in Russia.
FTC Chairman, Jonathan Leibowitz affirms, “Anything bad on the Internet, they were involved in it.” Other segments from the FTC’s reports indicated that 3fn.net hosted “vast quantities of illegal, malicious, and harmful content, including child pornography, botnet command and control servers, spyware, viruses, trojans, phishing related sites, illegal online pharmacies, investment and other Web-based scams, and pornography featuring violence, bestiality, and incest.”
The request to have Triple Fiber Network’s upstream Internet provisions suspended was granted by a Northern California District Court Judge. Marc Rasch, a former cybercrime prosecutor believes the Judge granted authority to the FTC largely because it has the power to shut down companies that appear to be engaged in unfair and deceptive practices, whereas criminal law enforcement agencies have a much higher standard for proving wrongdoing in order to convince a court to shut down an ISP.
The decision is an important milestone in the web hosting industry, and the circumstances surrounding the case reinforce that you should do everything in your power to help insulate your organization from security risks. When Triple Fiber Network (3FN.net) went dark, 15,000+ legitimate web sites were effected… without warning.
Is your business prepared for a catastrophic web hosting outage? If not, contact a FireHost Security Expert today to help assess your secure web hosting needs.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 at 9:00 am and is filed under Web Hosting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
