FBI Seizes Servers In Virginia

Axolotl_Rose writes "The FBI has seized servers belonging to several clients of a hosting company in Reston, VA, disrupting service for many other clients. 'In an e-mail to one of its clients on Tuesday afternoon, DigitalOne’s chief executive, Sergej Ostroumow, said: “This problem is caused by the FBI, not our company. In the night FBI has taken 3 enclosures with equipment plugged into them, possibly including your server — we cannot check it.” Mr. Ostroumow said that the FBI was only interested in one of the company’s clients but had taken servers used by “tens of clients.” He wrote: “After FBI’s unprofessional ‘work’ we can not restart our own servers, that’s why our Web site 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.'"

Comments

Re:Solution

[TooMuchToDo]

The hosting company I co-own with the rest of my employees is mid-sized (several million a year, but under 10 people), but we operate this way. Equipment is owned by corporations incorporated in the jurisdiction where it resides on a country-level basis. We own gear in the US, the EU, Japan, China, and Australia. No corporate entity is tied to another, and resources are redundant through the infrastructure. Come to me in the US with a subpoena for anything on any of our gear outside the US? Fark off. When the hell did people give up on their principles?

Hosting centre is at fault

[jamesh]

The hosting centre is at fault here. "Naughty Servers" should be clearly labelled as such so they can't be mistaken for "Benign Servers". If those fatcats in Washington had just listened when the 'Evil Bit' was first proposed we wouldn't be in this mess now!

Re:Hosting centre is at fault

[Dynedain]

It was a colo. And the hosting company (the owner of the machines) gave the FBI the info needed to pinpoint the one single server they were after. The FBI took several racks of equipment the hosting company had in that colo instead of just the single machine.

Re:good point

[X0563511]

Not really. To work (the analogy) they would have to lift and tow away whole sections of traffic at a time, only to return the vehicles (maybe, if you're lucky) weeks or months later.

Re:Restore from backup?

[CAIMLAS]

If the FBI has taken a full rack or more of equipment (as the article suggests), and they're a small shop, it would seem to me that a day or more is not an unreasonable recovery time.

Also, a hosting company may not actually do backups for customers, they may just 'rack and manage' on an exigent basis, leaving day-to-day to the customer.

Look, it's more than possible for a single guy to manage a half dozen racks of equipment on his own w/o much issue. Two, three guys, done right with good infrastructure, could do a couple dozen. We're not talking about anything complex, just simple single servers running an application or three. In this situation we're talking about a web hosting company, where they're constantly doing piddly 'little' things but almost always running short staffed. Switching is done by one guy/group, and the server maint by others. There is no room for 'disaster recovery in an instant' here. It'll be all up-hill, in the snow, in January, on Mars.With a higher than expected gravity.

Those same three guys are going to be hard pressed to rebuild their own infrastructure in day, too, backups or no backups. Figure it's noon before they even get chassis from Dell/IBM/HP to replace the ones stolen by the FBI that had their infrastructure on it, and then they've got to rebuild the racks, too - cabling, racking, and hardware RAID (like that doesn't take forever to perform). Considering it takes, what, 10 minutes? on some of these newer IBM servers to boot, this is hardly surprising. Add to all that the fact that their tape backup system, their disk backup system, and/or infrastructure switches may have been taken, and you've got a huge, huge headache. It takes, what, a day for two guys to simply install, cable, and rack a single rack chassis (guessing here) to all 40+ Us? And realistically, you can't have many more than 2-3 guys doing the work.

I'd be surprised if they got back up to 'fully operational' within 2-3 days. I'll be impressed if they don't go out of business.

Iceland

[biodata]

Decent infrastructure, decent government, some coastguards but not really interested in starting wars with anyone unless it's about fish, and a legislative framework that is conducive to free speech.

A problem endemic with law enforcement

[Attila Dimedici]

I am pretty sure this happened as a result of a problem that is endemic with law enforcement. A large percentage of people in law enforcement have come to believe that all people that they interact with are criminals who are acting to keep law enforcement from discovering the evidence to convict that person and/or others. As a result, they did not trust the hosting company to work with them to obtain all of the data of the target of their investigation.
The proper way to have done this would have been to go in with someone from the FBI who was technically proficient who would then work with the hosting company to isolate and migrate all of the virtual machines containing the target's data to a single server (or several, if that was necessary) and seize that server(s).