rc3.org Strong opinions weakly held

The FBI does not understand Web hosting

In Commentary on 22 June 2011 tagged with 4 comments

The New York Times has a report on an FBI raid that knocked some of my favorite sites offline yesterday. The FBI visited a colo facility and seized at least one full rack of servers leased by DigitalOne, taking down sites like Instapaper and Pinboard. Apparently they were going after a specific host but they had no idea how to seize only the hardware associated with that host, and in the age of virtualization, going after one VM could still cause many hosts to be taken down.


4 Comments

Heck, in the age of virtualization, seizing hardware is probably the least effective tactic. Your VM could be on another service provider’s machine in mere moments.

Posted by Jason! on 22 June 2011 @ 12pm

The other theory is that the warrant was vague on purpose so that they could pull a bunch of machines, thereby not making it unclear who the target is. Although you would think the bad guys would have a good idea regardless. Seems more likely that they just didn’t bother to care.

Posted by John on 23 June 2011 @ 12am

Sounds like the TPB raid five years ago. Police just marched in and pulled a few servers; unfortunately most of them were the wrong ones.

Posted by Simon Sigurdhsson on 23 June 2011 @ 5am

That should have been “thereby making it unclear” of course.

Posted by John on 23 June 2011 @ 12pm

Leave a Comment

← →

About

This is the weblog of Rafe Colburn. I'm a software developer and computer book author, but this blog is really about whatever catches my interest on a day to day basis. I've been blogging since December, 1998.

Recently

Visit the full archive

Et Cetera

You can follow @rc3dotorg on Twitter here. My personal Twitter account is @rafeco. If you know what an RSS feed is, you can subscribe to the rc3.org feed here.


← Back to Home

© rc3.org. Powered by WordPress using the DePo Skinny Theme.