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FBI seizes servers: Reminds IT admins to have a back-up plan

June 23, 2011, 12:46 PM PDT

Takeaway: If the FBI seized your Web servers by mistake, would you be able to keep your site up? Here are five tips to make sure you could.

Earlier this week, the FBI seized several servers at a hosting facility in Reston, VA. The servers were used by DigitalOne, a Web hosting company based in Switzerland. According the New York Times, the FBI was interested in just one of DigitalOne’s clients, but took equipment used to host several other sites, including those run by Curbed Network, Pinboard, and Instapaper.

According to the New York Times, Sergej Ostroumo, DigitalOne’s chief executive, said that the FBI took entire server racks, instead of just machines linked to a specific IP addresses:

DigitalOne provided all necessary information to pinpoint the servers for a specific I.P. address, Mr. Ostroumow said. However, the agents took entire server racks, perhaps because they mistakenly thought that “one enclosure is = to one server,” he said in an e-mail.

Remember to have a backup plan

Incidents like this should remind every IT admin and Webmaster to always have a backup plan. Even if your collocation facility is protected from natural disasters, power outages, and physical theft–there’s always the unexpected.

TechRepublic writer Suman Bolar suggests the following advice to ensure your organization is prepared for a Web hosting service disruption:

List your own company as the administrative and technical contact when registering your domain.
Identify a back-up hosting company.
Maintain a mirror site with another host if the size of your operation justifies the cost.
Maintain a checklist of steps to be taken if you need to switch to another host at short notice.
Always maintain your own current back-up copy of your site.

If the FBI mistakenly seized your Web servers, would you be able to keep your site running?

Additional resources:

For advice on avoiding web hosting disruptions, check out the following TechRepublic resources:

Get IT Tips, news, and reviews delivered directly to your inbox by subscribing to TechRepublic’s free newsletters.

About Bill Detwiler

Bill Detwiler is Head Technology Editor of TechRepublic. Previously, he worked as a Support Tech and IT Manager in the social research and energy industries.

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9 Votes

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What recourse do you have against the FBI...

CyberCritic 23rd Jun 2011

If the FBI walks into a hosting company and emptied it, what recourse if any do the customers have against the FBI. Loss of income etc? Also what about the hosting company. If the servers were in FBI hands for any length of time they could go out of business, do they have any financial recourse, especially if the servers are eventually returned and no charges are filed?

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6 Votes

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I have a serious problem with this

Alpha_Dog Updated - 24th Jun 2011

Innocent people are collateral damage in this war of theirs, a war in which they have no idea who is the enemy, yet they are allowed to take down the presumed innocent and completely innocent alike. Even in the heat of war, if an American soldier opened fire into a crowd to kill one bad guy, he would never again be a free man, yet the FBI can take down a server rack because one account of one machine piques their interest. For clarity let's translate this to something more common like physical real estate.

A vendor at a mall is being a bad boy... do the police shut down the entire mall until the investigation is over? No, there would be many lawsuits.

One person in a gated community is accused of kiddie porn. Is the entire gated community seized and every man woman and child carted off to jail? No. Again, there would be many lawsuits.

How about if a small farm starts growing pot on their 40 acres. Does everyone in the original land grant and plating of 3000 acres loose their farm land? No. people would object with a truly amazing array of legal action.

Why is it that the luddites in the FBI think that this is a good idea? Why is is that us IT geeks allow the bully to take our lunch money just because our server shares a rack with someone who is accused of being bad? Why are we not suing the government in civil court for lost revenue at RIAA level exaggerations and in criminal court for gross negligence? C'mon folks, sauce for the goose and all that.

Until someone says no, and enforces it with lawyers or firearms, we loose rights to government arrogance. This country was not founded by helping the redcoats pillage and burn, but rather standing up for the rights of the people.

To put it bluntly, this conduct by the FBI violates the reasonableness requirement of our constitutional rights under the 4th amendment. Some good reading about the remedies is at http://law.justia.com/constitution/us/amendment-04/30-exclusionary-rule.html. Other reading as it applies to the seizure of electronic evidence can be seen at http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/foia_ccips/20080123_sscoeecireu.pdf

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5 Votes

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Beware the cloud

bjswm@... 23rd Jun 2011

So for non US companies, we should be very wary of any "cloud" offering that utilizes US-based servers. It just isn't worth the risk.

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0 Votes

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Old school dev method

l_e_cox 1st Jul 2011

Actually, this topic is a little out of my depth. But I thought I'd leave a note because I realize that my method is no longer much used. It's a pain in the butt, and I don't use it for my blog because that uses a CMS (Wordpress). But I use it for my little personal sites.

I learned this method when I was going to school. We had a server at school where our projects were deployed. Some guys developed their sites by connecting to the server with FTP and pulling the files down to work on them then pushing them back up to see how the edits played out. That's how the instructor did it. But I wanted to be able work off line.

So I had a local copy of my whole site. Some of the configuration paths were different, so I had all my configuration lines in pairs, with one of the pairs commented out depending on whether it was the local version or the server version. It was extra work for sure, but it meant that I always had a full working version of my site on my local machine.

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0 Votes

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I have a problem with it too.

sissy sue 1st Jul 2011

As long as our fellow citizens are just itching to send other fellow citizens to prison, and as long as the government can motivate by fear, this and worse are going to happen. The American people need to respect the Bill of Rights and take back their freedom. The only way that will happen is when they start giving a damn about other citizens who are unjustly persecuted by a government that is supposed to protect and defend our "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness," but instead is the entity that is most likely to destroy them.

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0 Votes

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Google's going Legal !>

cosmos-420man 30th Jun 2011

I say that isn't this a good way for the SEC and the EEEI and last but not least the ETA and the EIFCA to get their laws, rules, regulations, and by-standers and all sorts and what not, all in order now ...???... Well, if your are a blue-and-white striped big-brother in whose like flint with your Internet Giant Regulation Committee and Foresight Engineers and don't forget Partner to partner idealist-IT form-style computing experts!!!

I thinked that hey Google coulda' do that ./././ ??? /././. Soooo, why not ICANN or ESA or ANON or GALNA or ANIN or GANIN do at toooo... All of these organizations ought to o the do the saem, right, like John Stockholme, American Adventilist and Patriot , or Andrew F. Hauser, European Poet and War Strategist ( he was alos the one to solve our computing problems with the Lybian forces in Kosovo and the Cuban Missile Crisis that spread the whole entire Rogue-11 and the Techno-Riot-fs directories Top Secret in 1993, a real killer to the individualists' CIA and Anti-crime Force (ICIA) and (AACF) Right?

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