hello world a few days ago a russian was
sent to prison in the us for five years
his crime providing bulletproof hosting
services but what is bulletproof hosting
and does it really have anything to do
with bulletproofing servers
no well sometimes the internet's a crazy
place if there's an audience for
something there's going to be a website
catering to that audience even the most
depraved content needs to find somewhere
to live web hosters of course know this
any legal hoster will have an array of
awful things in their terms of service
that they're just gonna ban you for
hosting and probably call the cops over
specifically this is godaddy's terms and
yes i'm probably the first person to
have ever read through them not the most
enjoyable read zero out of ten would not
recommend but i had to make the point
that they're very strict and in case
they come across something they have
forgotten to add in a catch-all clause
at the bottom gives them the right
removal disable access to any content at
any time and without notice oh and by
the way this isn't an ad for godaddy or
some kind of endorsement of them i do
have my own beef with them when they're
not procrastinating on making the dns
changes you requested they're busy being
hacked
but they did have some half funny ads
back in the naughties
there are two sides to godaddy there's
the sexy side represented by bar
raffaeli and the smart side that creates
a killer website for your small business
represented by walter together they're
perfect
anyway whilst legal hosting company is
going to have rules and a lot of them a
bulletproof hoster has comparatively few
rules and the more depraved among them
lack any rules
this is essentially the main selling
point of a bulletproof hoster they're
willing to host anything from illegal
marketplaces to things much more
depraved essentially if a legal hoster
won't touch it you can bet there's going
to be a bulletproof hoster that will
think malware botnet commander control
servers black market sites csam and so
on different bulletproof hosters have
different rules some will prohibit
certain content whereas others don't
care and will allow literally anything
you're probably thinking but this stuff
is illegal anyway surely stooping to
this level is just going to get your
data centers raided and yeah it will
which is why bulletproof hosters tend to
prefer to base themselves in certain
countries now of course the things that
bulletproof hosters host are illegal
pretty much everywhere i don't think
there's a country which will welcome any
of these things per se however what you
find is that some countries turn a blind
eye to certain types of illegal content
or just don't make tackling it much of a
priority these are the countries which
bulletproof hosters usually swarm to
places like the us aren't usually the
go-to choice for these kinds of guys
however there are exceptions one big
example being makolo.com it's
represented such a stain on the internet
by hosting spammers in particular that
when it was shut down in 2008 global
spam emails fell by about two-thirds
this represents spam emails per second
being recorded by spam cop a spam
reporting service the first part was
recorded when mikola was active after
being shut down and then it picks up a
couple of weeks later when spammers
started migrating their servers
elsewhere to other bulletproof hosts
however macolo is kind of ancient
history by internet standards having
first popped up almost two decades ago
and i noticed the mokolo.com domain is
on sale for only 2 grand if you want a
piece of internet history nowadays
bulletproof hosters like to base
themselves offshore in places like
seychelles ukraine or russia this
frustrates western law enforcement
because they can't do much other than
ask kindly for their servers to be taken
offline and when these hosting companies
do receive abuse reports that an ip
address they control is doing naughty
things they either ignore the reports or
immediately inform the customer who can
just move their infrastructure elsewhere
thus frustrating the whole process to
the point where it's not even worth
making an abuse complaint
and in some cases it's not even possible
to lodge an abuse complaint because some
bulletproof hosters employ certain
features like dns fast fluxing to hide
their true ip addresses in fast fluxing
instead of a domain pointing directly to
the server it's made to point to a proxy
which then itself points to the server
the proxy the miscreants use is rotated
sometimes every few minutes this makes
figuring out where the traffic is really
being rooted difficult
if ip addresses used for hosting
nefarious things are identified they may
be added to an ip blacklist one of the
more popular ones is hosted by a company
called spam house their drop list or
don't root or peer list consists of
hundreds of net blocks that are in the
hands of spammers or cyber criminals
these lists are often used by isps any
traffic from these ips will just be
discarded however funnily enough these
lists are often monitored by bulletproof
hosters themselves who will move their
clients to new infrastructure if their
ips are flagged in fact the russian guy
i mentioned at the beginning of the
video was observed doing just this
in the past few years some criminals
have moved their operations away from
bulletproof hosting onto the dark web
only accessible through tour dark web
marketplaces are of course the best
example of this as they pretty much
exclusively all use tor because as far
as anonymity goes it's the best you're
gonna get however tor isn't the best
option for all illegal activity it does
have its speed and reliability issues
and there's the fact that the ips of all
tor nodes are public so it's easy to
identify if traffic is coming to or from
tor this inherently makes that traffic
untrustworthy to many services
as long as cyber criminals need
somewhere to host their illegal wares
someone will be willing to fill the gap
in the markets let me know in the
comments do you want to see videos on
some of the more notorious now defunct
bulletproof hosters one of the most
famous is cyberbunker they hosted their
servers in a literal nuclear bunker in
the netherlands cyberbunker was one of
the few bulletproof hosts which really
took the bulletproof aspect literally
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north korean hackers posing as samsung
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