According to authorities in the USA the Australian Federal Police have been alerted to an ISP who has been involved in distributing millions of illegal spam messages including child pornography into Australian email accounts. The rogue ISP operator was closed down last Friday.

The US Federal Trade Commission has said that the Internet Service Provider, Pricewert had been responsible for the distribution of child pornography, botnet command and control servers, spyware, viruses, trojans, phishing-related sites, illegal online pharmacies, investment and other web-based scam into global email accounts including Australia.

Among the organisations who helped authorities gather evidence was NASA and Symantec.

Late on Friday the US Federal Trade Commission asked for Pricewert’s net links to be severed after it had gathered evidence of the firm’s ‘criminal’ connections.

The FTC alleges that Pricewert had created one of the “leading based havens for illegal, malicious, and harmful content”.

In evidence presented before the San Jose Federal court, the FTC described Pricewert as a “rogue” or “black hat” ISP that acted as a hosting centre for many hi-tech criminals who operated illegal operations into Countries like Australia.

ChannelNews has been told that the Australian Federal Police are aware of the evidence.

The FTC alleges that Pricewert was paid to host “child pornography, botnet command and control servers, spyware, viruses, trojans, phishing-related sites, illegal online pharmacies, investment and other web-based scams”.

According to the BBC the evidence against Pricewert was gathered with the help of Nasa’s computer crime division, Symantec, the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children, as well as groups such as Spamhaus and the Shadowserver Foundation.

So far, the FTC has not been able to identify who was behind Pricewert. Although its servers are based in the US, it is registered as a business in Belize and many of its employees are thought to be located in Eastern Europe.