F.B.I. seizes web servers, knocks sites offline
R. LaCasse
-----Original Message-------
(http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43488005/ns/technology_and_science-the_new_york_times/)
F.B.I. seizes web servers, knocks sites offline
Instapaper and Curbed Network are among the sites hit, though the cause of
the raid is unknown
By VERNE G. KOPYTOFF
New York Times
6/21/2011
The F.B.I. seized Web servers in a raid on a data center early Tuesday,
causing several Web sites, including those run by the New York publisher
Curbed Network, to go offline.
The raid happened at 1:15 a.m. at a hosting facility in Reston, Va., used by
DigitalOne, which is based in Switzerland, the company said. The F.B.I. did
not immediately respond to a request for comment on the raid.
In an e-mail to one of its clients on Tuesday afternoon, a DigitalOne
employee, Sergej Ostroumow, said: "This problem is caused by the F.B.I., not
our company. In the night F.B.I. has taken 3 enclosures with equipment
plugged into them, possibly including your server - we can not check it."
Mr. Ostroumow said that the F.B.I. was only interested in one of the
company's
clients but had taken servers used by "tens of clients." He wrote: "After
F.B.I.'s unprofessional 'work' we can not restart our own servers, that's
why our website is offline and support doesn't work." The company's staff
had been working to solve the problem for the previous 15 hours, he said.
Mr. Ostroumow said in response to e-mailed questions that it was not clear
if the issues would be resolved by Wednesday.
It is not clear what the F.B.I. was looking for, or whether the raid was in
response to recent attacks by hacker groups on corporate and government
sites.
A government official who declined to be named said earlier in the day that
the F.B.I. was actively investigating the Lulz Security group and any
affiliated hackers. The official said the F.B.I. had teamed up with other
agencies in this effort, including the Central Intelligence Agency and
cybercrime bureaus in Europe.
The sites of the Curbed Network, including popular blogs covering real
estate, restaurants and other topics, were all unavailable Tuesday evening.
Lockhart Steele, Curbed's president, said his team realized that the
company's
sites were down at around 3 a.m. and contacted DigitalOne. After initially
declining to say what had happened, DigitalOne explained that the F.B.I. had
raided the data center, Mr. Steele said.
"Our servers happened to be in with some naughty servers," he said, adding
that his sites were not the target of the raid. Curbed is working to get its
sites back online, probably by Wednesday.
The raid also affected a server used by Instapaper, a popular service that
saves articles for later reading. Marco Arment, Instapaper's founder, said
he lost contact with a server hosted by DigitalOne early on Tuesday.
Instapaper's Web site is still operating but has slowed somewhat. Mr. Arment
said he had not heard from DigitalOne or law enforcement, and had no reason
to believe that Instapaper was a target of the raid.
Pinboard, a bookmarking site, was operating on a backup server and some of
its features were turned off, a post on its site said.
DigitalOne provided all necessary information to pinpoint the servers for a
specific I.P. address, Mr. Ostroumow said. However, the agents took entire
server racks, perhaps because they mistakenly thought that "one enclosure is
= to one server," he said in an e-mail.
DigitalOne had no employees on-site when the raid took place. The data
center operator, from which DigitalOne leases space, passed along the
information about the raid three hours after it started with the name of the
agent and a phone number to call.
Before learning of the raid, Mr. Ostroumow, who is in Switzerland with the
rest of his team, thought the problem was a technical glitch.
Nick Bilton contributed reporting.
This story, "F.B.I. Seizes Web Servers, Knocking Sites Offline" first
appeared in the New York Times
-------------REPLY TO --Original Message-----------
That's a bad habit the all the LEOs have, they never seem to stop
Coping things....
They are full of mistakes, tons of errors, and can pig out like an
elephant, without any compensation to the victims....
They don't disable possible "culprits", they steal the product whole
hog without restitution to their barbaric Cops. They have nothing to do with
peace officers or service people anymore.
They haven't changed since the Peeler/Copper gang in the UK. They
have made non-disclosure laws to protect their Invasive activities, no
wonder most have been absolutely disarmed in Civilized Countries.
Just like any Burglar, THEY don't have to explain their criminal
activities....their Court Time Backup in all the botched rip-offs, is
another reason the Court systems should be eradicated here and there.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely
Me
--
**Father to Son in a Facts of Life Lecture**:
Son, someday you will make a girl very happy,
for a short period of time.
Then she will leave you and be with new men who
are ten times better than you.
........These men are called ^Computer Geeks^........
--
Triad Productions-Fantalla~EZine~ParaNovel
National Association of Assault Research
(http://*remove*pages.istar.ca/~vampire/htmlconc.html)