Notorious ‘Hijack Factory’ Shunned from Web
Summary: Bitcanal, a Portuguese hosting firm also doing business as Ebony Horizon, was cut off from the Internet in July 2018 after roughly a half-dozen bandwidth providers severed ties, following years of accusations that it hijacked dormant IPv4 address space and leased it to spammers. Researchers had traced suspected theft of millions of IPv4 addresses to the company, including address ranges assigned to the Texas State Attorney General's office and the U.S. Department of Defense, and Spamhaus had blacklisted virtually all of its ranges.
Why it matters: The takedown depended on upstream providers choosing to stop routing traffic for a customer, not on any technical control - and the hijacked space included addresses belonging to active organizations like the Texas Attorney General and the Department of Defense, whose reputation was borrowed to slip spam past blacklists.
Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗
- Topics
- Data Breaches
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