It was brought to my attention lately, over some incident, that Starhub is said to be associated with some Cybercrime orgnisation. First it was Russian Business Network (RBN), which host mainly the spam and fraudulent websites, and Starhub was said to host some of those fraudulent site.

Refer to the following links, Starhub was named:

rbnexploit.blogspot.com is the main group that is behind this research. Some of the blacklist published on the Internet include their research result, thus listed one of the Starhub class B subnet rougue.

I was not exactly convince, since Starhub is a major ISP in Singapore and, unlike RBN, Starhub business is legitimate. I thought Starhub could be just hosting for a customer who was associated with RBN. Moreover, RBN was “shutdown” early 2008 in light of publication of their Cybercrime activity.

I attempted to contact people at rbnexploit, asking for more information and asked whether they genuinely believe Starhub was associated with RBN. They send me those evidence above, and some statistics that Starhub was still hosting those fraudulent domain as of June 2008.Their attempt to contact Starhub previously proved futile.

I contacted Starhub who informed me that they had advised their customer to shutdown those sites. I went back to rbnexploit for further advice and analysis. They had not gotten back to me since then.

Today, I check rbnexploit’s update again, and found more shocking news. They had a new study against an ISP Atrivo and was convinced of Atrivo involvement in those Cybercrime against consumers in US and elsewhere. The picture below shows that Starhub is partnering with Atrivo, and Atrivo’s relationship with cybercrime related sites.

And, the following Youtube video tells you why Atrivo is bad.

What is the impact to us if Starhub is somehow involve? One thing for sure is the reputation of Singapore Government, reputed for its strong regulation, but allowing such things from happening. Another thing, those Starhub customer using blacklisted range of IP address may experience problem with their Internet access.

Researching such relationship and activities is really like putting 5000 pieces puzzle together. You got to find out the AS partnering, identifying rougue hosts etc, it is difficult and take up a lot of time, give rbnexploit some credit.