FTC delivers major blow to spam facilitator ISP

A company, most prominently operating as Triple Fiber Networks (3fn.net), got a rude awakening from the FTC last Tuesday. http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2009/06/3fn.shtm. The data center was not shut down; their bandwidth providers were petitioned to turn off the "internet spigot," effectively leaving the servers running with no way to get to the rest of the digital world.

Turns out, the company is not only allowing/tolerating spam bots, child porn hosts and online scammers to operate from its datacenter, 3FN has been actively positioning and advertising themselves as a premium solution for such dirtbags. Their ads have been spotted on several identity theft and other community sites where "high-risk hosting" services may be sought. These guys were pretty seriously nasty, and it's nice to have them out of the game.

Here's the government filing PDF. Actually, not too heavy reading, and some very interesting little tidbits of information collected to get the court order to shut down. http://www.ftc.gov/os/caselist/0923148/0906043fncmpt.pdf

The other side of the coin is that this move seems to have shut down many legitimate sites. One example I can cite is: http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/columns/free_software_magazine_caught_3fn_shutdown_crossfire. Thankfully, it looks like they landed on their feet OK. I know of other companies, and indeed entire web hosting companies (legit ones - yes) whose sites were hosted through 3FN. Some of these legit business sites have been dark since Tuesday, as their owners seek to retrieve their data and quickly move the sites over to another host.

I'm not sure what the alternative was, and certainly "the perps" needed to be taken down suddenly and without detection, but I must wonder whether another substitute/temporary host could have been arranged beforehand to avoid the downtime for legit operators. The ingenuity and creative thinking involved in web sites these days always amazes me; seems like it could have been employed to help alleviate some of the pain.

The ne'er-do-wells will of course also move their sites, but if this move sends a message about what the US will tolerate to happen on our turf, this is a victory for the good guys. Overall, I think we've done more good than harm here.