A screenshot shows the DigitalOne website is still down on Wednesday
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — The FBI confiscated three racks of blade servers from a Virginia data center on Tuesday, according to a report by the New York Times.
Switzerland-based hosting company DigitalOne (www.digitalone.com) says the Reston, Va. data center, where it leases space, was raided at 1:15 a.m. The raid affected “tens of clients,” according to Digital One chief executive officer Sergej Ostroumow.
Ostroumow told customers in an email that the company could not restart its servers, as the raid took its website offline and its customer support with it.
On Wednesday morning, DigitalOne’s website was still unavailable.
Other sites affected by the raid included Instapaper, Curbed Network and Pinboard and others, according to the report. Those sites appear to be online on Wednesday morning.
Ostroumow would not disclose which customer he believed to be a target, although the FBI has been on the hunt for hackers with connection to hacker group LulzSec (www.lulzsecurity.com) recently. The FBI did not comment on the operation or its relation to LulzSec.
On Tuesday, a 19-year-old was arrested in connection to the Sony PlayStation Network outage by London police.
Despite DigitalOne providing the information of the target’s IP address, the FBI took unrelated servers as well, according to the report.
As a web host that offers shared hosting it can be difficult and costly to ensure other customers stay online when a raid like this occurs.
DigitalOne had no employees on-site during the raid and claims the data center operator told DigitalOne about the raid three hours after it started.
Register reports that the 285,000-square-foot data center is owned and operated by CoreSite.
About Nicole Henderson
Nicole Henderson writes full-time for the Web Host Industry Review where she covers daily news and features online, as well as in print. She has a bachelor of journalism from Ryerson University in Toronto, and has been writing for the WHIR since September 2010. You can find her on Twitter @NicoleHenderson.
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