# Russian Business Network A St. Petersburg–based internet service provider, active in the mid-2000s, that became the archetype of **[[Bulletproof Hosting]]** — and the case that first put criminal hosting infrastructure on security researchers' map. Maintaining the front of an ordinary ISP, the Russian Business Network (RBN) knowingly rented takedown-resistant server space to a who's-who of cybercrime, and was linked by researchers to an enormous share of the era's online criminal activity. ## What it hosted Exposed in 2006–2007 reporting (notably by VeriSign and security journalists), RBN was tied to: - **Phishing operations** estimated to have caused roughly **$150 million** in fraud; - **Botnets** rented out for spam and DDoS attacks; - **Mass identity theft and financial fraud**; - **Malware distribution** (including the Storm Worm and various banking trojans) and child-exploitation material. Some analyses linked RBN's infrastructure to a large fraction of the world's cybercrime at its peak — a figure that is hard to verify precisely but captures how central the network was. Crucially, RBN did not break into victims itself; it sold the *infrastructure* that everyone else's crimes ran on, the business model that defines bulletproof hosting. ## Disappearance and legacy Under intensifying press and researcher scrutiny, RBN went dark around November 2007 — not dismantled by law enforcement so much as fragmented and relocated, its operations dispersing across new providers and jurisdictions. That outcome set the enduring pattern for the bulletproof-hosting sector: demand is constant, takedowns disrupt specific hosts but rarely the underlying market, and successors continually emerge. ## Right-wing-KB relevance RBN is the historical anchor for this vault's coverage of criminal-cyber infrastructure and the **Russia permissive-harbor dynamic**. Its ability to operate openly from Russian soil for years — tolerated, never seriously prosecuted — prefigures the same harbor that later sheltered the ransomware gangs discussed under [[Ransomware-as-a-Service]] and blurs into the deniability architecture around [[Russian State Hacking Groups]]. RBN is where the modern picture of a state that profits from *not* policing the cybercrime on its territory comes into focus. ## See Also - [[Bulletproof Hosting]] - [[Ransomware-as-a-Service]] - [[Russian State Hacking Groups]] - [[Cybersecurity Lexicon]]