Yesterday nearly all information had come from either the authorities, police or staff at datacenters, notably Sweden’s PRQ, but since then TorrentFreak sources with varying levels of inside information have been trying to put us in the picture.Read more of that story here.
So, keeping in mind that reporting on the Scene is a black art, that we’ve had to hold some information back to protect certain individuals and keep our sources happy, and redact here and there to protect others, here are our findings thus far.
“In pretty much all of the cases the police just walked into the datacenters, proceeded with warrants, more or less unplugged the boxes and left with them,” one source told us. “They knew very well exactly what they were looking for and this was a highly coordinated attack.”
While there were reports of individuals having been taken in for questioning yesterday, for an operation of this size those numbers seem unusually low. This is due to the operation targeting only ‘topsites’ – no specific release groups or their members appear to have been the focus of the action. It’s believed that some siteops weren’t so lucky.
Slyck News focused their reporting on The Pirate Bay's situation in the context of these raids and delivers some relatively good news:
Yesterday brought news of a massive file-sharing raid across Europe that saw many top-level sites taken offline. This happens every now and again in the file-sharing ecosystem. While the scope of the raid was impressive, the real issue boiled down to: why is The Pirate Bay offline?
The raids don't appear to be related to The Pirate Bay's downtime. Although one of the raids took place in Sweden at the PRQ data center (which used to host The Pirate Bay), we believe the BitTorrent search engine left its native web host a long time ago. Back in May of 2010, The Pirate Party agreed to host The Pirate Bay - however they were not a focus of the raids.
Unfortunately, little information on the matter exists - except chatter in The Pirate Bay's IRC channel. No word on the downtime was on their Twitter or Facebook page.
The word on IRC was that it was a technical issue (a damaged CPU) - and perhaps some intoxication on the part of the administrators. In any case, as we were preparing this article, The Pirate Bay is once again online and appears very responsive.
1 comment:
A warez raid? Sounds a bit fishy to me, as if they are searching for something (or someone) else.
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