The Stockholm-based web host PeRiQuito AB, or PRQ, has long attracted some of the most controversial sites on the Internet. Now it’s attracted a less friendly guest: Sweden’s police force.
Stockholm police raided the free-speech focused firm Monday and took four of its servers....
TorrentFreak.com says:
A raid against Swedish hosting company PRQ has been confirmed today. Due to the action by police many file-sharing and streaming sites are now down or inaccessible.Meanwhile, The Pirate Bay remains unreachable.
All sites hosted on the 80.88./19 net are currently unavailable, including but not limited to the torrent sites torrenthound.com, linkomanija.net and tankafetast.nu, release blog RLSLOG.net, and the sports streaming sites atdhenet.tv, hahasport.com, sportlemon.tv and stopstream.tv.
Private BitTorrent sites that use PRQ’s services are also affected. They include GFTracker and Bithumen, to name just two.
The PRQ raid coincided with downtime at The Pirate Bay but TorrentFreak is informed that this is unrelated. The Pirate Bay says it’s not using PRQ’s services and attributes the downtime to a power failure.
PRQ owner Mikael Viborg told Nyheter24 that the police were looking for particular hardware.
“Yes, they’re looking for four servers,” he said. “It is the first time since 2010 they have done this.”
The raid wasn’t plain sailing. The police first arrived on Monday hunting for hardware behind certain IP addresses. However, due to a technical error PRQ’s systems were down and the hardware could only be identified when the systems were restored today.
At this point in time Viborg cannot say which sites or services police are targeting, but he believes the investigation is related to intellectual property violations.
“No, I have not been told,” he said earlier. “Police are sitting in the office now but I have to wait until tomorrow. Then I can find out what is happening.”
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