FTC shuts down rogue ISP

The FTC has ordered 3FN Service to pay $100m in damages

A US internet service provider has been shut down by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for actively helping criminals to distribute spam, spyware and child pornography.

3FN Service has been ordered to pay over $100m (£69m) of its "ill-gotten gains" to the FTC, and its servers and other assets have been seized.

Harmful electronic content distributed by 3FN included spyware, viruses, Trojans, phishing schemes, botnet command-and-control services and pornography.

The FTC said that more than 4,500 malicious software programs were controlled by servers hosted by 3FN, including software capable of keystroke logging, password stealing and data theft.

3FN is alleged to have advertised its services in chat rooms frequented by criminals, and to have shielded its activity by ignoring protection requests from online security communities.

The ISP was also accused of shifting its criminal activity to other IP addresses it controlled in order to avoid detection.

The closure of such operations can have a dramatic, if short-term, effect on spam levels. When two major ISPs cut off internet access to hosting company McColo Corp in late 2008, spam rates fell by between 40 and 75 per cent.

McColo Corp had been accused of hosting the command-and-control systems for a number of major botnets and child pornography web sites.