WikiLeaks urged to stop hosting on Russian blackhat ISP

Virtual mafia state, indeed

Security watchers have urged Wikileaks to stop hosting its material with a "bulletproof" Russian ISP believed to primarily cater to, or be controlled by, Russian cyber criminals.

Wikileaks.org now points to a mirror of the site, mirror.wikileaks.info, hosted by Webalta, a blackhat ISP linked to a company called Heihachi Ltd, according to Spamhaus. The .org URL has been WikiLeaks' main web address since its launch in 2006.

"Spamhaus regards the Russian Webalta (also known as Wahome) host as being "blackhat" - a known cybercrime host from whose IP space Spamhaus only sees spamming, malware/virus hosting, phishing and other cybercriminal activities," the anti-spam organisation said on Tuesday evening.

The warning follows similar concerns raised by Trend Micro, which also runs a spam-blocking list.

Both firms said that whatever political view one takes of the ongoing WikiLeaks saga, the site's administrators should take more care over the company it keeps.

Ironically, the judgment of an investigator that Vladimir Putin's Russia is a "virtual mafia state" has been one of the highest-profile disclosures from the US embassy cables so far released by Wikileaks.

"The fact that recently some unknown person or persons decided to put a Wikileaks mirror on IP address 92.241.190.202 should raise an alarm; how was it placed there and by whom," said Spamhaus.

"Our concern is that any Wikileaks archive posted on a site that is hosted in Webalta space might be infected with malware... Spamhaus takes no political stand on the Wikileaks affair."

Trend Micro said: "We don't know whether wikileaks.org has perhaps been compromised or whether WikiLeaks is knowingly getting services from a blackhat provider.

"To give you an idea, here are some illustrious neighbors: paypal-securitycenter.com, carders.kz, idchecking.ir (phishing), and postbank-sicherung.com."

The wikileaks.org domain was offline for a week after the plug was pulled by its DNS provider EVERYdns.net. It reappeared on Friday after being registered with another US DNS outfit, Dynadot. ®