We should note these are not even slightly legitimate hosting companies, lest anyone worry too much about their non-KYC offshore servers. These aren't hosting companies that ask little, they are just directly front companies for Russian intelligence, owned by members of Russian intelligence, they don't do anything else, they don't provide hosting service to regular people even if you want it (I have tried).
Unlike in Germany where I lost several social media accounts because my email service provider (pissmail) went to jail because someone signed up for his service and sent spam.
The company inherited all their customers and equipment from a sanctioned company (according to the Dutch news report). Should be enough for most people.
>they don't provide hosting service to regular people even if you want it (I have tried)
That doesn't sound right. I used PQ.Hosting once when I needed a quick temporary VPS, just like many other legitimate users. Yes they never asked much, but they also used to ban users left and right even for torrenting, so it wasn't bulletproof in any meaningful sense. I'm sure they were into shady stuff though, since their IP quality used to be absolute crap, but they did provide legitimate services as well.
German authorities arrest people for running email services and then they are confused about why doesn't Germany have a Silicon-Valley-style tech industry.
After reviewing your updated customer information, we have decided to deactivate your account because of some concerns we have regarding this information. Therefore, we have cancelled all your existing products and orders with us.
Best regards
Your Hetzner Online Team
---
This is the email that I received, after I mistyped my credit card data, when creating an account on Hetzner Cloud. You don't have to be a big cloud company to enforce the KYC rules to defend against fraud.
I wonder how big/small wa pissmail? Would be good to know where is the threshold of sanity:
1. staying with smaller providers is cheaper (and you usually get non-AI customer support)
2. at the risk of stepping into something that makes you lose your data (like you did)
Maybe don't use any German service you can't afford to lose. Their government hates the tech industry, no matter how much it sings its praises. Same government just labeled watermelons as illegal antisemitism, btw.
I’ve been on the defender side of security my whole career.
I know in some markets crime pays more than legitimate work, but it never ceases to amaze me how much thought, effort, planning, and engineering goes into providing infrastructure IT services for cybercriminals. The people involved definitely have the skills to be profitable at legitimate work; it just puzzles me that they choose to support criminals.
I watched the downfall and eventual jailing of someone who had a great job, career, and family after he started getting involved in cybercrime.
As far as I can make sense of it, he enjoyed the thrill of feeling superior to others: Evading the law, exploiting people who viewed as stupid, and enriching himself in the process.
He got caught through a mistake that was really dumb in retrospect. I think he believed his intellectual superiority combined with the stupidity of others so much that eventually he couldn’t imagine anyone catching him.
>As far as I can make sense of it, he enjoyed the thrill of feeling superior to others: Evading the law, exploiting people who viewed as stupid, and enriching himself in the process.
I sadly see this pattern of thinking far more often than I want to in my fellow eastern Europeans.
Let's not generalize, even if you feel like you can say that because you're a member of a group you're generalizing. It's unfair to most of the people in any group being generalized.
> he enjoyed the thrill of feeling superior to others [...] He got caught through a mistake that was really dumb in retrospect.
It seems to be common occurrence. I still can't get over that one hacker who dumped stolen data on forum, to sell it/prove his capabilities, in form of tar.gz archive, that accidentally included his entire home directory
It's not easy to go legit, especially in today's job market, depending on where you live in the world also.
The US is unique with its high salaries for tech work (on the lower end of those of high salaries is pure ops work like this though). If you're in a country where the average sysadmin salary is substantially lower (to pick on Eastern Europe for a minute, you're looking at the equivalent of ~$30-35k USD/year), it's not hard to see why its tempting to go the cybercrime route.
...because on HN, experiences which somehow contradict the perspective when salaries are highly varying across countries, esp. when someone decides to pick an explicit example, which, even if it shows the truth, is against the base-assumption of the reader of a comment.
> to pick on Eastern Europe for a minute, you're looking at the equivalent of ~$30-35k USD/year
This is a disingenuous claim. Not only are there software engineers in rich western European countries that in absolute terms earn less than that but also your east European software engineer still earns multiple times their country's average salary.
I think s/he meant that if you earn 30k it's easy to be tempted by crime because the numbers are big. What night not tempt a Google engineer might tempt a telecoms infrastructure key from Anytinytown, Moldova/Romania/...
That said I don't think there are many good software engineers that earn less than that in Western Europe. Net maybe, but certainly not gross, and if it's net that covers anything from pension security to healthcare, meaning you can live a decent life in most places.
> I think s/he meant that if you earn 30k it's easy to be tempted by crime because the numbers are big.
I'm pointing out that this reasoning doesn't pass the smell test. A 30k salary in those countries actually represents between 5-to-10x your average salary. You are already considered rich and we'll off and leading a comfortable life.
It's like claiming your average FANG engineer earning half a million a year would be easily tempted to engage in criminal activity if that meant they could aspire to earn a few millions instead.
> (...) meaning you can live a decent life in most places.
Yes, there are only a few countries on earth where your average software engineer earns more than that, and mostly because their average salary and cost of living is already way larger. Some sources even state that the average salary of s software engineer in Japan is as low as $36k/year. Japan has a higher cost of living than most east European countries, they have a reputation of competence and technical expertise, and still you don't see Japan as synonymous with cybercrime.
Really? Because while I've seen this, rarely, in individuals. In many cases once you start tracing money the amounts involved in many "die for their beliefs" situations is absurd. Terrorism, for example.
What point are you trying to make other than bigotry? Ethic Russians are not the only Eastern Europeans perpetuating cyber crime. Anyways, Nesterenko is a Ukrainian surname - at least get your racism correct.
Some people are just born into it. Mafia families, etc. There were some very smart people in the American mob, running scams that were immensely profitable. Eventually they get caught though, and with the ease and pervasivness of electronic surveillance today, it's pretty much impossible to do it anymre at least if you're anywhere where the authorities care about it (edit to add: and aren't in on it).
Imagine working for an organization where 1) cybersecurity is actually the #1 priority, ahead of "shareholder value" and all the other gobblygook, 2) you get to design systems where you actually have to assume that every other entity is malicious (not the usual carve-outs like "oh yeah we do zero trust.. but our entire management plane is Azure-managed it's unavoidable"), 3) your budget is effectively unlimited, and 4) you get paid several factors more than you would in private industry.
In a previous life I've employed contractors and software engineers to run a criminal website. Motivations for my guys were that it was well paid work that was technically challenging in order to evade enforcement agencies, and was 'fun' in that respect; they were "sticking it to than man (my service was regarded as moral by all my users & others); and there wasn't so much work about that they could pick and choose; lastly, I was a good employer because I had to be!!
Because they cannot be profitable. Job market is not the same on both ends. If you are east European and you try to get a job in an international corporation, the in all cases offer salaries adjusted for regional averages, unless you are willing to reallocate. Only few startups and FAANG like companies, often compensation in line what is received in the western world.
And there is also a thrill of doing it, which other guys already mentioned.
If we use one of the comments from here that it was done at the behest of some government then its more like the offensive team of a legitimate government. Pretty much every thing can be colored grey that way and one just needs to find people that they can persuade or convince for their cause.
I wouldn't advise thinking of it as "providing infrastructure IT services to cybercriminals", as if these people are primarily IT people, running primarily infrastructure, who just happen to favor this audience.
I would rather advise thinking of these efforts as various cybercriminal groups going through the schlep of setting up their own backend IT infrastructure for their own use (because they couldn't find anyone to host them); and then, with built infra in hand, either:
1. realizing that their own needs were emblematic of a more-general unmet market demand for "don't ask, don't tell" hosting, and so branching out into hosting as a secondary business;
2. taking the charade of a hosting company they made up when e.g. registering for an ASN, and deciding that the more real they make that charade, the more it protects them; and so slapping together a facade of a hosting site (that serves no real customers and has no real control-plane);
3. or deciding that having real customers with actual legitimate traffic coming from their ASN further legitimizes them (and makes other ASNs more wary to just block them wholesale), and so actually standing up the facilities of your average VPS provider on some single sad box somewhere — probably running some turn-key IaaS appliance (usually not OpenStack, more likely some shoddy old thing they bought on a cybercrime marketplace);
4. or (and I think this is the most common route) chatting with cybercriminal friends of theirs, and those friends hitting them up for hosting when they realize that they've actually built something out for themselves; and this gradually just evolving into a de-facto hosting arm of the business (as they accept more of these "high-touch" word-of-mouth customers; eventually begin to feel burdened by manually configuring their systems to accommodate these customers; and so begin to automate things.)
Both forms exist. There are real hosting companies that just turn a blinder eye to crime than others, and those ones should maybe be forced to divest from certain customers but shouldn't be completely raided. And there are cybercrime groups who form fake hosting companies. These ones were from the latter group. I tried to rent servers from them once, but they don't actually take customers because they aren't a real hosting company.
You were not born in eastern Europe that’s why. That’s the whole Eastern European mind set - the only way to succeed is to rip people off or scam. Anything else is already taken or no money in it or government will take it away from you.
When I was learning some homelab stuff, and was setting up pfSense, I was able to see the geos of all the scans/attacks on my home internet IP. I was surprised to see that Netherlands was up there with Russia and China in volume. They all got geo blocked.
What is it about the Netherlands that makes them so attractive to these people?
Amsterdam is one of the biggest (perhaps the biggest) global internet hubs - European equivalent of North Virginia - and also not a totalitarian country like Germany (otherwise there'd be more in Frankfurt).
I see couple of issues here:
> 1) "Netherlands Seizes 800 Servers" - this should not have happened. Full stop. It's not US, UK or even DE. We are losing, people.
> 2) They did not turn those into "honey pots". meaning: they did not want a fix. They wanted a show.
> 3) I bet it's just a tip of an iceberg. Care to assume how many of those are hosted at "major cloud providers"? Money talks ...
None of the servers seized from this small datacenter were hosted at a big cloud provider, they were hosted at the small datacenter and not a big cloud provider.
> those sanctions failed to target Stark’s remaining connection to the Internet — an Internet service provider based in the Netherlands called MIRhosting.
The fuck, i walk past the office of mirhosting every day
Now can we also seize some servers for the massive organized DDOS campaign that seems to be plaguing many small hosts lately or are the originators too big for that?
We should note these are not even slightly legitimate hosting companies, lest anyone worry too much about their non-KYC offshore servers. These aren't hosting companies that ask little, they are just directly front companies for Russian intelligence, owned by members of Russian intelligence, they don't do anything else, they don't provide hosting service to regular people even if you want it (I have tried).
Unlike in Germany where I lost several social media accounts because my email service provider (pissmail) went to jail because someone signed up for his service and sent spam.
Any source to back up your claims? Otherwise it seemed pretty much a conspiracy theory to me.
The company inherited all their customers and equipment from a sanctioned company (according to the Dutch news report). Should be enough for most people.
That just means the sanctioned company was selling to sanctioned entities, not that it was only selling to them.
Who cares, that's a due diligence failure on their part. No consumers were involved. Do business with shady companies risk shady shit happening...
Sanctioned company != works for the government.
>they don't provide hosting service to regular people even if you want it (I have tried)
That doesn't sound right. I used PQ.Hosting once when I needed a quick temporary VPS, just like many other legitimate users. Yes they never asked much, but they also used to ban users left and right even for torrenting, so it wasn't bulletproof in any meaningful sense. I'm sure they were into shady stuff though, since their IP quality used to be absolute crap, but they did provide legitimate services as well.
legal threats of torrenting == lots of attention. not really something that the SVR or GRU want on their secret servers.
plus they just gobble bandwidth. you want a bit to ensure your company looks real / makes some $$$ but you don't want to threaten your C2 nodes
> email service provider (pissmail)
I'm sorry this happened to you.
it was a good alternative to cock.li for some time. alas
German authorities arrest people for running email services and then they are confused about why doesn't Germany have a Silicon-Valley-style tech industry.
Dear Dr [my name]
After reviewing your updated customer information, we have decided to deactivate your account because of some concerns we have regarding this information. Therefore, we have cancelled all your existing products and orders with us.
Best regards
Your Hetzner Online Team
---
This is the email that I received, after I mistyped my credit card data, when creating an account on Hetzner Cloud. You don't have to be a big cloud company to enforce the KYC rules to defend against fraud.
I wonder how big/small wa pissmail? Would be good to know where is the threshold of sanity:
1. staying with smaller providers is cheaper (and you usually get non-AI customer support)
2. at the risk of stepping into something that makes you lose your data (like you did)
Maybe don't use any German service you can't afford to lose. Their government hates the tech industry, no matter how much it sings its praises. Same government just labeled watermelons as illegal antisemitism, btw.
I’ve been on the defender side of security my whole career.
I know in some markets crime pays more than legitimate work, but it never ceases to amaze me how much thought, effort, planning, and engineering goes into providing infrastructure IT services for cybercriminals. The people involved definitely have the skills to be profitable at legitimate work; it just puzzles me that they choose to support criminals.
> The people involved definitely have the skills to be profitable at legitimate work; it just puzzles me that they choose to support criminals.
I don't think it's that easy to go legit. having a tech job nowadays is already a luxury
I watched the downfall and eventual jailing of someone who had a great job, career, and family after he started getting involved in cybercrime.
As far as I can make sense of it, he enjoyed the thrill of feeling superior to others: Evading the law, exploiting people who viewed as stupid, and enriching himself in the process.
He got caught through a mistake that was really dumb in retrospect. I think he believed his intellectual superiority combined with the stupidity of others so much that eventually he couldn’t imagine anyone catching him.
>As far as I can make sense of it, he enjoyed the thrill of feeling superior to others: Evading the law, exploiting people who viewed as stupid, and enriching himself in the process.
I sadly see this pattern of thinking far more often than I want to in my fellow eastern Europeans.
Let's not generalize, even if you feel like you can say that because you're a member of a group you're generalizing. It's unfair to most of the people in any group being generalized.
Re-read my comment as it is written and note that my observation does not generalize.
Generalization is a tool, not something inherently bad or evil.
Generalizing doesn't mean everybody or even most in the group. It means it's a common behavior in the group relative to other groups.
sounds like Markus Braun & Jan Marsalek / Wirecard, the fraudsters :-D
Sounds like Breaking Bad
His stupidity was to let you see him. Let that sink in.
> he enjoyed the thrill of feeling superior to others [...] He got caught through a mistake that was really dumb in retrospect.
It seems to be common occurrence. I still can't get over that one hacker who dumped stolen data on forum, to sell it/prove his capabilities, in form of tar.gz archive, that accidentally included his entire home directory
Cybersecurity is always last on the budget list. It is not easy to make money working in cybersecurity.
The only upside here is that criminals will (through legislation) eventually force companies to invest more.
It's not easy to go legit, especially in today's job market, depending on where you live in the world also.
The US is unique with its high salaries for tech work (on the lower end of those of high salaries is pure ops work like this though). If you're in a country where the average sysadmin salary is substantially lower (to pick on Eastern Europe for a minute, you're looking at the equivalent of ~$30-35k USD/year), it's not hard to see why its tempting to go the cybercrime route.
why is this downvoted?
...because on HN, experiences which somehow contradict the perspective when salaries are highly varying across countries, esp. when someone decides to pick an explicit example, which, even if it shows the truth, is against the base-assumption of the reader of a comment.
To put it somehow dimplomatic :-D
> to pick on Eastern Europe for a minute, you're looking at the equivalent of ~$30-35k USD/year
This is a disingenuous claim. Not only are there software engineers in rich western European countries that in absolute terms earn less than that but also your east European software engineer still earns multiple times their country's average salary.
I think s/he meant that if you earn 30k it's easy to be tempted by crime because the numbers are big. What night not tempt a Google engineer might tempt a telecoms infrastructure key from Anytinytown, Moldova/Romania/...
That said I don't think there are many good software engineers that earn less than that in Western Europe. Net maybe, but certainly not gross, and if it's net that covers anything from pension security to healthcare, meaning you can live a decent life in most places.
> I think s/he meant that if you earn 30k it's easy to be tempted by crime because the numbers are big.
I'm pointing out that this reasoning doesn't pass the smell test. A 30k salary in those countries actually represents between 5-to-10x your average salary. You are already considered rich and we'll off and leading a comfortable life.
It's like claiming your average FANG engineer earning half a million a year would be easily tempted to engage in criminal activity if that meant they could aspire to earn a few millions instead.
> (...) meaning you can live a decent life in most places.
Yes, there are only a few countries on earth where your average software engineer earns more than that, and mostly because their average salary and cost of living is already way larger. Some sources even state that the average salary of s software engineer in Japan is as low as $36k/year. Japan has a higher cost of living than most east European countries, they have a reputation of competence and technical expertise, and still you don't see Japan as synonymous with cybercrime.
The median annual salary in places like Moldova and Romania is $3-6k USD? Edit: apparently $5k and $10k, respectively.
You fail to take into account the ideological angle.
Some people are ready to die for their beliefs. Others just to run businesses supporting their causes.
3 of the 4 persons named have russian links (a large number of Moldovan citizens are ethnic russians).
> Some people are ready to die for their beliefs.
Really? Because while I've seen this, rarely, in individuals. In many cases once you start tracing money the amounts involved in many "die for their beliefs" situations is absurd. Terrorism, for example.
What point are you trying to make other than bigotry? Ethic Russians are not the only Eastern Europeans perpetuating cyber crime. Anyways, Nesterenko is a Ukrainian surname - at least get your racism correct.
Some people are just born into it. Mafia families, etc. There were some very smart people in the American mob, running scams that were immensely profitable. Eventually they get caught though, and with the ease and pervasivness of electronic surveillance today, it's pretty much impossible to do it anymre at least if you're anywhere where the authorities care about it (edit to add: and aren't in on it).
Imagine working for an organization where 1) cybersecurity is actually the #1 priority, ahead of "shareholder value" and all the other gobblygook, 2) you get to design systems where you actually have to assume that every other entity is malicious (not the usual carve-outs like "oh yeah we do zero trust.. but our entire management plane is Azure-managed it's unavoidable"), 3) your budget is effectively unlimited, and 4) you get paid several factors more than you would in private industry.
In a previous life I've employed contractors and software engineers to run a criminal website. Motivations for my guys were that it was well paid work that was technically challenging in order to evade enforcement agencies, and was 'fun' in that respect; they were "sticking it to than man (my service was regarded as moral by all my users & others); and there wasn't so much work about that they could pick and choose; lastly, I was a good employer because I had to be!!
Because they cannot be profitable. Job market is not the same on both ends. If you are east European and you try to get a job in an international corporation, the in all cases offer salaries adjusted for regional averages, unless you are willing to reallocate. Only few startups and FAANG like companies, often compensation in line what is received in the western world.
And there is also a thrill of doing it, which other guys already mentioned.
If we use one of the comments from here that it was done at the behest of some government then its more like the offensive team of a legitimate government. Pretty much every thing can be colored grey that way and one just needs to find people that they can persuade or convince for their cause.
I wouldn't advise thinking of it as "providing infrastructure IT services to cybercriminals", as if these people are primarily IT people, running primarily infrastructure, who just happen to favor this audience.
I would rather advise thinking of these efforts as various cybercriminal groups going through the schlep of setting up their own backend IT infrastructure for their own use (because they couldn't find anyone to host them); and then, with built infra in hand, either:
1. realizing that their own needs were emblematic of a more-general unmet market demand for "don't ask, don't tell" hosting, and so branching out into hosting as a secondary business;
2. taking the charade of a hosting company they made up when e.g. registering for an ASN, and deciding that the more real they make that charade, the more it protects them; and so slapping together a facade of a hosting site (that serves no real customers and has no real control-plane);
3. or deciding that having real customers with actual legitimate traffic coming from their ASN further legitimizes them (and makes other ASNs more wary to just block them wholesale), and so actually standing up the facilities of your average VPS provider on some single sad box somewhere — probably running some turn-key IaaS appliance (usually not OpenStack, more likely some shoddy old thing they bought on a cybercrime marketplace);
4. or (and I think this is the most common route) chatting with cybercriminal friends of theirs, and those friends hitting them up for hosting when they realize that they've actually built something out for themselves; and this gradually just evolving into a de-facto hosting arm of the business (as they accept more of these "high-touch" word-of-mouth customers; eventually begin to feel burdened by manually configuring their systems to accommodate these customers; and so begin to automate things.)
Both forms exist. There are real hosting companies that just turn a blinder eye to crime than others, and those ones should maybe be forced to divest from certain customers but shouldn't be completely raided. And there are cybercrime groups who form fake hosting companies. These ones were from the latter group. I tried to rent servers from them once, but they don't actually take customers because they aren't a real hosting company.
You were not born in eastern Europe that’s why. That’s the whole Eastern European mind set - the only way to succeed is to rip people off or scam. Anything else is already taken or no money in it or government will take it away from you.
> it just puzzles me that they choose to support criminals.
Same reason for CIA and NSA engineers.
> Stark Industries Solutions
jarvis, whats the status of my dutch servers
When I was learning some homelab stuff, and was setting up pfSense, I was able to see the geos of all the scans/attacks on my home internet IP. I was surprised to see that Netherlands was up there with Russia and China in volume. They all got geo blocked.
What is it about the Netherlands that makes them so attractive to these people?
High bandwidth and (relatively) low sentencing would be my guess..
That's where the servers are. See all the tor nodes in Netherlands. They aren't actually in the Netherlands.
What is this supposed to mean?
Most of the tor nodes in Netherlands are actually physically in Netherlands.
Amsterdam is one of the biggest (perhaps the biggest) global internet hubs - European equivalent of North Virginia - and also not a totalitarian country like Germany (otherwise there'd be more in Frankfurt).
Those who are curious about notorious data centers, please see Cyberbunker [1]. I think conceptually it is cool. Also in the netherlands.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberBunker
I see couple of issues here: > 1) "Netherlands Seizes 800 Servers" - this should not have happened. Full stop. It's not US, UK or even DE. We are losing, people. > 2) They did not turn those into "honey pots". meaning: they did not want a fix. They wanted a show. > 3) I bet it's just a tip of an iceberg. Care to assume how many of those are hosted at "major cloud providers"? Money talks ...
> Care to assume how many of those are hosted at "major cloud providers"?
Zero (not a guess)
Exhibit 1: GRU-linked Sandworm/APT44 campaigns (2021–2025)
None of the servers seized from this small datacenter were hosted at a big cloud provider, they were hosted at the small datacenter and not a big cloud provider.
It would be nice if they named/prosecuted the people who paid them to perform the attacks.
Law enforcement doesn't typically talk about ongoing investigations.
The FSB? What are you going to do about that. Russia shot down an airliner full of Netherlands citizens and there were no repercussions.
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48241775
> those sanctions failed to target Stark’s remaining connection to the Internet — an Internet service provider based in the Netherlands called MIRhosting.
The fuck, i walk past the office of mirhosting every day
Now can we also seize some servers for the massive organized DDOS campaign that seems to be plaguing many small hosts lately or are the originators too big for that?
Maybe it's because I haven't had my coffee yet, but I swear my brain read: "Neanderthals Seize 800 Servers"
I'm I the only one that read "Neanderthal Seizes 800 Servers..."?
Would have loved to read that article.