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Operation FastLink Yields Three Arrests

Posted by timothy on from the book-'em-danno dept.

Doomrat writes "As promised (see previous story), Operation FastLink has led to the arrests of 3 key members of the Fairlight group. NHTCU officers and local police executed search warrants and arrested three men at separate locations in Sheffield, Manchester and Belfast. Over 200 computers have been seized, along with 100 CD copiers. Raids were carried out in the UK, the U.S., Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Israel, the Netherlands, Singapore and Sweden."

4 of 555 comments (clear)

  1. Re:strange by kryptkpr · · Score: 5, Informative

    A friend that's close to the scene tells me that for the past while FLT had been selling leech accounts on their private dumps. He quoted $800 usd for leech on a 7tb server with a 1gbit connection.

    I guess they sold to the wrong person, and they got busted..

    --
    DJ kRYPT's Free MP3s!
  2. Re:I wish... by JaredOfEuropa · · Score: 4, Informative
    I wish... they put all that effort into hunting criminals that actually hurt people (as opposed to wallets).
    Rest assured that they are: the police of various countries often work together to track down terrorists and murderers. You should also realise that a lawful society depends on all laws being enforced. Things would turn into a right mess if the police would stop going after petty crime, traffic violations and fraud cases, until they had solved all murder cases.
    --
    If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
  3. Re:Not a good effort. by Slack3r78 · · Score: 4, Informative

    It depends. At the school I go to, there was a kid busted for running a warez server which had apparently been up for some time. From what I understand, the reason he was caught was because the school upgraded their connection - while in the past it was common for the bandwidth to be maxed out at all hours of the day, suddenly the extra bandwidth allowed them to notice suspicious spikes in activity that shouldn't have been there.

    True, there are other things that an admin can watch for, but many schools simply don't have the budget to pay someone to constantly monitor all traffic in and out.

  4. Re:Not a good effort. by Zan+Zu+from+Eridu · · Score: 5, Informative
    They didn't just catch three people in this operation, but they took down several servers, some of which the operators might not have realized were even being used for warez distribution.

    That's bullshit. I know some people who've been raided here in the Netherlands, and I can tell you that almost all of those confiscated servers were in student dorms and connected to university networks; most of them on 100mbit lines, some on 10mbit lines.

    It's the fat lines those groups are after, you would need thousands of cable/dsl lines to "race" an ISO (these groups are in competition to get the cracked versions out as fast as possible). And they're not hacking those boxes, they're paying for them with status as a "courier" or with real money. I know students who've been offered 100 euro a month or more to put a 10TB server in their room.