Netherlands Seizes 800 Servers, Arrests 2 for Aiding Cyberattacks

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.

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

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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)

I'm sorry this happened to you.

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.

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.

I don't think it's that easy to go legit. having a tech job nowadays is already a luxury

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.)

And there is also a thrill of doing it, which other guys already mentioned.

The only upside here is that criminals will (through legislation) eventually force companies to invest more.

Same reason for CIA and NSA engineers.

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).

Zero (not a guess)