Incidents in which police seized whole or large part of a provider/datacenter.

Yuki_

@Dyingcat said:
There should be at least one country you wanna skip, too many incidents.

Which country did you have in mind? I yet to find much skewing of incidents towards any one particular country.

Yuki_

@whynotlearn said:

@Dyingcat said: There should be at least one country you wanna skip, too many incidents.

Speaking of this, is there any country which you want to actively use for cases like this (where there is a good track record and 0 raids) ?

There was this I think 21 people deployed thing in the world which someone claimed to be its own country and then had some servers there Yea Sealand and havenco.

Anything similar to this or countries which is privacy friendly in a similar context which haven't gotten raided?

None that I am aware of, of course many so called bulletproof providers work out of Russia but they will also get raided if you use servers for something the local authorities do not like, and they are lacking in privacy. To get privacy you need laws to protect the data but to not get raided you need a lawless region, so your criteria can not be fulfilled. Those regions like Sealand have to poor connectivity for hosting, other regions like Transnistria still fall under local authorities rule.

stefeman

Cociu incident

alectrocute

What about the 2013 federal raid on the DC in Iceland related to Silk Road? https://www.wired.com/2014/09/the-fbi-finally-says-how-it-legally-pinpointed-silk-roads-server/

Yuki_

@alectrocute said:
What about the 2013 federal raid on the DC in Iceland related to Silk Road? https://www.wired.com/2014/09/the-fbi-finally-says-how-it-legally-pinpointed-silk-roads-server/

If I remember correctly barely even the silk road was affected by this outage, let alone any larger parts of the provider or datacenter. They swapped the drive saying it failed and rebuilt the raid.

WyvernCo

Mass seizure/shutdown is a good reason to avoid 'bulletproof' providers (or even just ones that have a long history of ignoring abuse reports) if you don't want to eventually become collateral damage.

Torfirion

PRQ was also raided again in 2012, only servers from two clients were seized but the whole infrastructure went down for 24-48h https://www.google.com/search?q=prq+2012+raid+torrentfreak

More recently 250 servers seized in NL https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/data-centers-in-the-netherlands-raided-250-servers-seized/

2023 in NL, raid targeting IPTV but pulled the whole datacenter(1200 servers off) https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-iptv-data-center-raid-took-down-several-innocent-websites-230525/

2014: A raid targeting The Pirate Bay occuring at Bahnhof, in their nuclear proof DC with dozens of servers seized : https://torrentfreak.com/criminal-pirate-bay-investigation-closed-after-statute-of-limitations-expired-191030/

Yuki_

@Torfirion said:

PRQ was also raided again in 2012, only servers from two clients were seized but the whole infrastructure went down for 24-48h
I did look at this, it seems I must have missed the fact that a whole /19 went offline.

More recently 250 servers seized in NL

According to Bleeping Computer and Spamhaus this was an effort against Serverion customer CrazyRDP, which was already mentioned :-)

2023 in NL, raid targeting IPTV but pulled the whole datacenter(1200 servers off)

Already mentioned a couple posts back :-)

2014: A raid targeting The Pirate Bay occuring at Bahnhof, in their nuclear proof DC with dozens of servers seized

Seems like only TPB was affected?

Yuki_

Updated list using the input from this thread

Host        year    country     Reason
PRQ         2006    Sweden      PRQ customer servers were taken due to one of them hosting TPB, police gained nothing due to everything having FDE.[1]
DigitalOne  2011    USA         Multiple racks and 100+ innocent websites down were taken offline in an alleged raid on LulzSec by the FBI[6][7]
PRQ         2012    Sweden      
URDN        2015    Ukraine     Special police take servers for ransom due to unpaid bribes.[4]
CyberBunker 2019    Germany     Datacenter CB-3 raided and CyberBunker taken offline.[5]
Globe       2023    Netherlands Globe DC was taken offline in relation to a large IPTV raid taking innocent victims with it.[12]
FlyHosting  2023    Germany     Police raids and takes down FlyHosting.[13]
NiceVPS     ~2024?  Switzerland All of NiceVPS servers located in Switzerland were taken offline due to one of them hosting BF.[2]
Solia.cloud 2025    Germany     Solia.cloud operators were arrested on drug trafficking and ddos related charges bring this host offline.[8]
StarkRDP    2025    Germany     StarkRDP was brought down in conjunction with other sites as part of Operation Talent.[9]
URDN        2025    Ukraine     Special police take servers for ransom due to unpaid bribes.[3]
CrazyRDP    2025    Netherlands An effort against Serverion customer CrazyRDP brought offline 250 servers.[10][11]

1 - See TPB AFK documentary
2 - I am having a hard time finding source for this but I remember it. If someone else has a source to this posting it would be helpful.
3 - https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/202699/urdn
4 - https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/67199/urdn-is-dead/
5 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberBunker
6 - https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2011/06/fbi_seizes_web_servers.html
7 - https://www.reuters.com/article/business/media-telecom/web-hosting-firm-says-fbi-took-servers-in-raid-idUSN1E75L0ML/
8 - https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/202324/turns-out-solia-cloud-didnt-exit-scam-the-owner-was-arrested-and-servers-were-seized-by-feds
9 - https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/fbi-seizes-crackedio-nulledto-hacking-forums-in-operation-talent/
10 - https://securityaffairs.com/184757/cyber-crime/dutch-police-takes-down-bulletproof-hosting-hub-linked-to-80-cybercrime-cases.html
11 - https://xcancel.com/spamhaus/status/1990423936593518971
12 - https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/186577/massive-globe-data-center-shut-down-by-fiod-and-europol/p1
13 - https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/185428/german-police-raid-ddos-friendly-host-flyhosting

Not sure if I should add MaxiDed the press only talks about 10 servers being taken offline.
This paper https://damonmccoy.com/papers/maxded.pdf talks about MaxiDed as a middle man for server sellers and buyers more so then an actual hosting provider.

Yuki_

Stark Industries 2026 Netherlands 800 server seized 2 people arrested[1]
1 - https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/217535/stark-industries-the-hosting-netherlands-location-dismantled-800-servers-seized-2-people-arrested#latest

Andreix

CyberBunker was not in Sweden?

Yuki_

@Andreix said:
CyberBunker was not in Sweden?

No, although it was somewhat famously used by TPB after PRQ got raided in Sweden.

vipul

Lolekhosted in 2023

https://www.sophos.com/en-us/blog/crimeware-server-used-by-netwalker-ransomware-seized-and-shut-down

mp11

@Andreix said:
CyberBunker was not in Sweden?

first operated in a former NATO bunker in Zeeland, Netherlands, from which it got its name, and later in another former NATO bunker in Traben-Trarbach, Germany. There is a nice docu about it

https://www.netflix.com/bg/title/81632983?preventIntent=true

concept

@mp11 said:

@Andreix said:
CyberBunker was not in Sweden?

first operated in a former NATO bunker in Zeeland, Netherlands, from which it got its name, and later in another former NATO bunker in Traben-Trarbach, Germany. There is a nice docu about it

https://www.netflix.com/bg/title/81632983?preventIntent=true

@Alyx is the best person to ask to get the correct info on Cyberbunker.

bozolover99

PRQ / The Pirate Bay ? hope they didn't get my email and personal information