Russian Business Network study - bizeul.org

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RBN study – before and after
David Bizeul
Overview
It’s interesting to observe that many recent cyber crime troubles are relating to Russia. This observation is obviously a
simple shortening. Indeed nothing seems to link to Russia at first sight, it’s a nasty country for sending spam but many
are worst, Russia is only the 8 th top spam country [ 1 ]. We need to dig deeper to identify that cyber crime is originating
mostly from Russian dark zones. In a digital world, those dark zones exist where the Internet becomes invisible and it’s
used for collecting phishing sites credentials, for distributing drive by download exploits, for collecting malware stolen
data, etc.
It’s a considerable black market as it has been revealed in this paper [ 2 ].
A lot of information can be available over the web on Russian malicious activities and precisely on the way RBN
(Russian Business Network) plays a major role in these cases.
1. Russian cybercrime
Before going into RBN deeply, it’s interesting to focus a few moments on Russia. This country has always been known
for its good virus writers. Some of their creations (Bagel, MyDoom, Netsky) have been a plague to fight against for some
readers.
In Russia, hacking philosophy is a common attitude and some technical magazines written in Russian have a real
success. Moreover young people have good computing skills but it seems there is a lack of facilities for IT employment.
In this context, over-educated people or highly skilled guys have to find ways to use their abilities to earn money and
some of them will chose to offer their skills for cybercrime. Several industry fields have been designated as good
targets:
• World financial economy first: foreign victims may have wealthy bank accounts. And banks are supposed to
offer adapted services to their customer in a moving world such as worldwide money transfers. This can be
a very juicy activity.
• Software industry: that’s a common situation when people do not have sufficient money to buy desired stuff,
they steal it. That’s what’s happening with software industry, there is a widespread piracy on almost
everything digital. This piracy is very visible in Russia because the principle of pay-for-use is not really
accepted.
• Sex: this field has always been considered as a very profitable one, that’s a reason why there is a lot of
pornography websites hosted in Russia as in other country where laws are inefficient to fight against this.
A very good web page offers an interesting analysis on Russia hidden face nowadays [ 3 ].
1 http://www.sophos.com/pressoffice/news/articles/2007/07/dirtydozjul07.html
2
http://sparrow.ece.cmu.edu/group/pub/franklin_paxson_perrig_savage_miscreants.pdf
3 http://www.crime-research.org/analytics/Viruses_Russia/
4