Authorities in Germany have seized a server used by the organization that published a trove of US police internal documents commonly known as BlueLeaks, according to the organization’s founder.
On Tuesday, Emma Best, the founder of Distributed Denial of Secrets or DDoSecrets, a WikiLeaks-like website that has published the police data, said that prosecutors in the German town of Zwickau seized the organization’s “primary public download server.”
Videos by VICE
“We are working to obtain additional information, but presume it is [regarding] #BlueLeaks,” Best added on Twitter. “The server was used ONLY to distribute data to the public. It had no contact with sources and was involved in nothing more than enlightening the public through journalistic publishing.”
Best shared a screenshot of the email they received from DDoSecrets’ hosting provider informing of the server seizure.
“Your server has been confiscated,” the email reads. “Until now we were not allowed to inform you accordingly.” The email then notes that the seizing authority was the Department of Public Prosecution Zwickau.
DDoSecrets has recently taken WikiLeaks mantle as the most influential leaking organization on the internet, publishing several dumps such as data stolen from the Chilean military, and Neo-Nazi messages exchanged on the chat platform Discord.
Do you work or did you use to work at a police department? Or have you found some interesting data among the BlueLeaks collection? We’d love to hear from you. You can contact Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai securely on Signal at +1 917 257 1382, OTR chat at lorenzofb@jabber.ccc.de, or email lorenzofb@vice.com
At the end of June, the organization published what it called BlueLeaks, a collection of almost 270 gigabytes of data likely hacked and stolen from police fusion centers in the US. The data included internal law enforcement communications, as well as some personal information belonging to agents. A day after DDoSecrets publicized the leak, Twitter banned the organization’s official account. The server seizure appears to be the latest escalation in the battle to stop the spread of the leak.
“We’re gonna get set up with a new data host and move up our plans to evolve some of our infrastructure,” Best told Motherboard. “It’s the perfect time for it to fall apart because we were rebuilding it anyway. It’s a huge headache and a violates the ideal of press freedom, but we’ll survive, even if we have to close Hunter for a time. The equivalent system they mention is blank and unconfigured, and obviously we can’t rely on it.”
The prosecutor’s office in Zwickau did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Subscribe to our new cybersecurity podcast, CYBER .
