Where RBN has gone or whether it will resurface is, however, a mystery for now. ""Where will they go next, assuming they want to reproduce the same model somewhere else? I don't know," said the iDefense analyst.

According to iDefense, RBN as a single organization may be dead and gone. The model used in Russia, which it replicated momentarily in China, was of a top-down, centrally-controlled network in which one or two Internet service providers (ISP) connected a number of semilegitimate companies to the Web. Those companies, in turn, rented so-called bulletproof servers to criminals, meaning that the servers wouldn't be taken offline when complaints were filed by security researchers.

"It was great in terms of control and in terms of money," said the iDefense analyst, noting that the vertical integration put more money in the organization's pockets.

Rather than return in that format, RBN may even now be breaking up into smaller pieces farmed out to multiple countries' Internet infrastructures. "That may keep it under the radar, but it's also more expensive for them, and it's riskier, too, because the more ISPs that it has to deal with, the better the chance that one of those ISPs says 'no' to hosting RBN content and shuts them off," said the analyst.

On the plus side -- for its clients -- by splitting up, RBN can delay detection and make prosecution difficult. "It's a lot harder for law enforcement when there are six or seven countries involved," said the iDefense researcher. "But I think we'll be able to track them. We've done that kind of thing before when a group has been spread across two or more ISPs."

But as a monolithic, centrally-controlled organization -- ironically the model that dominated the now-defunct Soviet Union -- RBN is likely dead. "As we've known it, I think RBN is gone," said the researcher.