FTC Gets ISP Thrown Offline

The FTC has obtained a court ruling throwing an ISP offline and hopes to make it permanent.

The Federal Trade Commission has had the plug pulled on an ISP, and has applied to court in San Jose for that to become permanent, presenting evidence and asking that ISP Pricewert’s net links be severed forever. The FTC says it has evidence of Pricewert’s criminal connections, which supposedly include distributing spam and images of child abuse, calling it one of the "leading US-based havens for illegal, malicious, and harmful content."

Pricewert denies the allegations and says it will fight the move in court.

Claiming that Pricewert, which runs several companies hosts "child pornography, botnet command and control servers, spyware, viruses, trojans, phishing-related sites, illegal online pharmacies, investment and other web-based scams,” the FTC has gathered evidence with the help of Nasa, Symantec, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and others, according to the BBC.

However, the FTC did admit that its allegations were "not a finding or ruling that the defendant has actually violated the law." That’s up to the court, and a preliminary hearing is set for June 15. In the meantime, the judge has ordered upstream providers to disconnect servers, and has frozen the company’s assets.

Pricewert’s servers are US-based, but it’s a Belize-registered company, and it’s believed most of its employees are in Eastern Europe. The FTC has been unable to discover who actually owns the company.