As part of the “closure” on the February Malicious Page of the Month, which involved meoryprof.info (taken down), and spywaresafe.net we have contacted the appropriate parties in order to notify them that these websites contain malicious code.

Meoryprof.info was the first to buckle (probably under the press exposure), but spywaresafe.net have managed to stay afloat for quite a while. The problem with such domains these days, is that they are usually designed to hide the true owner in the best possible way.

Spywaresafe.net has been running in full-steam for only a short period of time, but has managed to rack up quite a track record of user visits and infections (see the below screenshot from its NeoSploit admin page)

(note that this screenshot is rather old and contains data on the first half of February only… nevertheless, almost 300k visits were logged to the main user and 150k more on the second user)

Looking into the whois record for spywaresafe.net would yield a disappointment – it is hidden using a service provided by privacyprotect.org. This service allows domain owners to hide behind an entity that would provide them “privacy”. The practice itself may seem questionable, but privacyprotect.org has a nice website with easy to access forms for requesting the disclosure of a domain owner in case there is some kind of “abuse” done by it.

Well… that didn’t really work. Sending a couple of these forms in the past month got us absolutely nowhere. No response, not even a decline for our request. These guys must be doing a too good of a job protecting something (definitely not internet users, but something…).

On the bright side, when we contacted the hosting company that was associated with the IP address for spywaresafe.net (78.109.18.130), the response was surprisingly quick, and the security guys there took the offending site down (p.s. – always use email, trying to call in brought an unbridgeable language barrier):

—quote—

…

The actions accepted by us:

Server IP: 78.109.18.130 it is disconnected and formatted.

…

—quote—

Although the company policy there is not to disclose details about the client who paid for this service (can’t blame us for trying ).

Moral of the story – undecided (hence – good, bad, ugly?). Seems like the law enforcement efforts does work, on targeted incidents (no follow up on the second domain). Trying to be the good samaritan does not always play well, and you get to hurdles such as these privacy protection schemes (which in my opinion have no place on the internet), and to surprises such as the guys in hosting.ua (Ukraine’s national hosting) who diligently stepped up to the plate. One has to admit that there really is no place for discrimination on the net…

In hope that we won’t have to do any more of this and have law enforcement and CERTs kick in for those cases, I’ll sign off for this time