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No I am making said comments about GERMAN POLICE and GERMAN COURTS and GERMAN LAWYERS.
People are good around the world. It's the controlling types and their bully agents that are the problem.
Only a jackass bully police unit seizes a drive like that.
Yeah every police unit in the world seized drives like that...
you know this is like arresting everyone in a townhouse complex just because there is a criminal living in one of them..
Well if that's the status quo, than to hell with them all. Buffoonery pure and simple.
Agree again @earl.
Or arresting a random black person since a crime was committed in his/her black majority population neighborhood.
Only if you HAVE to approach every black man in the neighborhood to get to where you KNOW the law has been broken could it be a reasonable comparison.
Only if you physically cannot arrest any less than all of them would that be a reasonable comparison.
If you want local police to have the kind of funding to bring in a data expert on seizure of property that they've been authorized to seize, you can expect a hefty tax increase to come with it no matter where you live. Be reasonable. Datacenters are not sanctuaries from the law. It's not the police's fault that more than one person uses the drives. If they don't seize the drives, a huge loophole is left in data seizure. You just have to outsmart the local tech guy. Like that's hard. I know people hate when they get caught in the middle but a civilized society requires a little bit of enforcement of standards, and reasonable expectations of the process required to do so.
Anyway, sucks this happened. Glad you got your site back online.
on the same note only if you cannot shut down just the offending VPS that shutting down the whole server would be reasonable..
They should also have people in charge that know what an IP is!! considering we are in the digital age they should start funding to increase these type of awareness.. cause it's not going to get any better, we are progressing to a paperless world and as such how you handle data should not be taken lightly..
The local police cannot always shut down the individual VPS and guarantee that they are hitting the right thing. How many OpenVZ experts does your local department pay? Talk about a wasted budget if the number is above 0. They're supposed to take the owner's word for it and walk out of there with only the data the the owner tells them to take or doesn't find some sneaky trick to hide? Yeah, no. Until they prove that it's the client, it's the owner that they'll consider a suspect. They should not be required to take the suspect's word and then walk away.
Be realistic. They have a job to do just like everyone else, and they don't have an unlimited budget unless you're willing to go hungry for it.
@Maounique like everywhere
We should start a datacenter in Somalia!
Actually, by yanking a random drive it will be much harder to:
1. be sure it is the right drive;
2. be sure the data IS recoverable (if it was some kind of stripping raid ?);
3. be sure you can read the data correctly, maybe was part of a volume group or has some encryption on it...
It will be MUCH better to have someone which at least has an idea on the spot, if you cant afford an expert, you will NEVER be able to convict anyone, so why try this ? only for intimidation or to make life hard for a company at the command of another company ? Mafia state ?
Cool. It is also not police fault there are criminals in a bus. Just use a drone to nuke it, it should teach a lesson to ppl not to use buses. If they are not killing everyone there, it would create a big loophole in fighting crime. Buses are not sanctuaries from the law, same as in Israel, towns are not sanctuaries for terrorists, if the whole town should be bombed, so be it, they are too many to arrest anyway.
You outsource. Ship the drive off.
Overreaction of the month. Why blow it so early? Still weeks to go.
I noticed @Nick_A didn't say anything yet...
True @jarland and fair points.
But seizing a drive that is essentially the rental space for a multi-tenant service is hat-backwards.
Think of it as a rental storage space where people store their excess stuff... Police believe someone in one of the units has contraband. So they haul off all the goods and property of the people renting space in each and every unit. That would be insane and not tolerated. But is, since this is data.
There is plenty of forensic hardware and government policies on how to do this and do so nearly unnoticed.
Idea is to preserve the evidence. A full copy. A portable storage array and some cables would suffice to create a full copy. That doesn't cost squat compared to the crazy police expenditures in any major police department.
@mnpeep
I noticed @Nick_A didn't say anything yet...
Because he doesn't have to, this is Ramhost
. Unless you were expecting a comment on the name similarities :P
@jarland
your reasoning is that just cause it's not in the hospitals budget to have a heart surgeon on site then you should have your family doctor do open heart surgery on you? don't you think they should have specialized task force so they can do their job correctly?
Agreed and I'm sure most agencies would be happy to adopt such policies should they be suggested and funded. Can't have everyone up to date the second the experts understand how things could work. Someone actually has to propose and fund it. In your local area, there are ways to do this.
Oh, I mixed up the two companies. Silly me.
No that's actually your reasoning. You're suggesting that the police do something they aren't trained to do. If you think they should be trained to do so, approach your local government. You can't just think it and it's so, nor should it be. They do the best they can with what they have. Don't like it? Give them better.
That and asking the host to make you the copy. If you suspect they are involved, you are either out of your mind, or you should take EVERY server.
If the subsequent investigation doesnt end in conviction, they should pay much more than the wage of an expert.
I did at first too, I'm sure nick would have been in this thread if it were ramnode
but that's exactly what you are saying cause taxes would increase if we were to train someone in the police department that this type of behavior with just yanking a whole drive is acceptable..
The local police in podunk don't have this stuff but major city PDs do. Most datacenters are in major metros.
When they lack folks it goes up stream to country or equivalent level and finally a state level. If beyond them, federal agencies certainly have the people even if to just step in to help.
Years ago agencies outsourced most of this disk forensics to private techs and tech companies. Have some experience with that. These days, less likely as everyone employees far more tech people in the various agencies.
This issue screams of the need for security, encryption within the server and within the containers. Give them useless data. Not because I'm a pirate or something, but because stuff like this happens and who knows where your data ends up.
@Maounique @jarland @pubcrawler
@pubcrawler @earl you are vastly overestimating the guys that do the actual house searches/seizings. Their job is to retrive the physical evidence, which is then analyzed by externel consultants. They probably don't even know what an OpenVZ container is. And they don't need to know that because it's not their job.
Think of it like this: If there is a murder case and the police finds fingerprints on a knife at the crime scene, they aren't just gonna take the fingerprints off the knife and then let it lie around. They are going to take the knife and lock it up in the evidence room.
It is perfectly acceptable if that is the resources they have. The alternative being that they refuse to enforce the law because they can't do it your way? That's not acceptable either. Another alternative being that they restructure their system on the fly and then try enforcing it again next month? Be realistic. Until someone proposes and funds a better way, that is likely all they can do.
So they are not trained to raid either.
Police doesnt go in hospitals to yank tubes out of patients because the equipment was bought from a money laundering or mafia company, or that one of the local anaesthesist is believed to add cocaine in the oxygen masks to create a drug market.
If they lack the capabilities should not do it because it will only lead to damages awarded and no conviction.
Which is why @gsrdgrdghd, if they have idiots seizing anything, then they should be taking the entire computer. No guarantee the buffoons could get a RAID or any striping working by shoving drives in some other random enclosure.
It could have been anything that violated Germany law. Germany also has very strict hate speech laws and very tight regulations on the operation of (legal) adult websites.
Similar to what happened during the Megaupload shutdown/seizure last year. The site was full of stolen material and copyright thiefs but there were also actually a lot of legitimate small businesses that used it for storing business data and records, developers who used it to store projects, and everyday people who used it to store family photos, etc. If you seize the hard drives in any shared hosting environment innocent people will end up being collateral damage.
Almost sure it wont work, especially if it was just one drive. I would laugh so hard if they had the actual storage on a SAN or something and they just yanked the system drive... This is exactly the kind of mistake someone not knowing what it does will do. This is why police HAS to have a specialist or NOT go raid computers.
What if they suspect a nuclear power plant is selling uranium to the Iranians ? Will they go there and yank the computers away to search for evidence ? Because they cant afford an IT/nuclear engineer they wont bring one but will still proceed with the raid ?
Again @pubcrawler you are implying that the guys doing the raid know what a RAID is. Those are the same guys that didn't seize an iMac during a house search because they thought it's "just a monitor"
On a related note: Did you have a VM on the node?
All I'm saying is they should have someone qualified to do the task.. under your reasoning there is no other way so why bother arguing with the police? if we become complacent and accept these types of behavior from the police why would they bother trying to change this practice of just yanking a whole drive..