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    Dutch Police Take Down Massive Pirate IPTV Operation With a Million Users

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    Dutch fiscal police have carried out a large-scale raid that appears to have taken down one of Europe's largest IPTV operations servicing more than a million users. No services or companies are being named but according to local anti-piracy outfit BREIN, the targeted organization sold access via third-party resellers. Meanwhile, Dutch data center Globe went completely dark.

    In recent years, many people have canceled their expensive cable subscriptions, opting to use cheaper Internet TV instead.

    Those who choose the cheapest plans often end up at pirate services. These may work flawlessly for years, until they don’t.

    Fiscal Police Raid IPTV Service
    Today, one of the largest pirate IPTV services was taken offline by the Dutch fiscal police (FIOD). Four people were arrested while searches were carried out at various business and residential addresses, where cars, computers, bank accounts and large sums of cash were confiscated.

    The raids and searches were carried out in multiple cities throughout the Netherlands including Amsterdam, Almere, Enschede, The Hague, and Den Helder.

    The name of the IPTV operation is not mentioned by the authorities but it appears to be massive. Local anti-piracy group BREIN reports that TVs in hundreds of thousands of homes went dark due to the raids. Europol, which also assisted in the operation, mentions that the service had over a million users across Europe.

    Criminal Case
    BREIN applauds the action and notes that it will file criminal charges on behalf of several major rightsholders, several of which have already indicated that they want to join the case.

    The IPTV service, which charged a monthly subscription fee of roughly 10 euros, carried more than 10,000 TV channels. It also offered access to 15,000 on-demand movies and TV series from popular services such as Disney+ and Netflix, causing substantial damages.

    “This is the largest criminal investigation by the Dutch fiscal police FIOD and the Dutch prosecution into digital piracy in the Netherlands ever,” says BREIN director Tim Kuik commenting on the news.

    “Illegal IPTV is the most serious threat to legal offerings of movies, series, television and sports broadcasts. This case concerns a criminal organization behind the large-scale sale of illegal IPTV subscriptions in the Netherlands and elsewhere. It involves tens of millions of euros in damages in the Netherlands alone.”

    Kuik said that he prefers not to name any of the persons or companies involved. However, hr confirms that the targeted organization supplied third-party sellers, both online and through physical shops.

    Data Center Offline?
    Dutch police highlight that the IPTV service was distributed from a data center in Den Helder. While we can only speculate, this could be GLOBE DataCenter, whose office is located there. The data center’s website is unreachable at the time of writing so the entire network could be offline.Further details will likely come out as the investigation and the potential prosecution progresses.

    Offline (small selection)
    This certainly isn’t the first large-scale IPTV takedown in Europe. We have seen several of these operations in other countries, including Spain where an ‘unnamed’ IPTV service with two million users was pulled offline.

    Apparently, other IPTV services continue to step up to fill the void. This is no surprise; to some people, a potential revenue stream of one billion euros per year sounds like an opportunity, rather than a threat. However, today’s action shows that the risk isn’t just hypothetical.

    Update: Additional research shows that hundreds of IPTV related domains/brands and IP-addresses have indeed gone dark.

  2. #2
    Respected zeekboy's Avatar
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    Pirate IPTV Data Center Raid Took Down Several Innocent Websites
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    This week, the Dutch fiscal police took down one of Europe's largest illegal IPTV operations, which acted as a supplier to many smaller services. The action centered around a local data center where 1,200 servers were pulled offline. Many of these servers were allegedly used to serve IPTV, but the action also took down several legitimate websites operated by entirely innocent companies.

    The Internet is littered with shady IPTV services that offer a lot, for very little money.These deals often seem too good to be true and in most cases they are; at least for those who prefer to stay on the right side of the law.

    Pirate IPTV Raid
    This week, Dutch fiscal police (FIOD) landed a major success in the battle against this type of piracy by shutting down one of Europe’s largest IPTV operations. This wasn’t just a random target either. The operation presumably offered its services to countless smaller IPTV sellers, which served over a million subscribers.

    Little detail was released about the main defendants but authorities report that four people were arrested. The available information also suggests that GLOBE Datacenter was a key target. This makes sense as its website and network have been offline for two days now, downtime matched by the company’s Twitter feed.

    FIOD confirmed that it won’t release any names of suspects at this point. However, police say that 1,200 servers were intentionally taken offline at a data center, which was allegedly operated by one of the main suspects.

    GLOBE servers
    While IPTV raids are not rare, we seldom see an entire commercial data center taken offline in the process. This would suggest that police had information that the hardware and network were almost exclusively used to facilitate the alleged criminal activity.

    Legitimate Businesses go Offline
    Looking at the sites that were hosted on GLOBE’s autonomous system number (AS212708), we indeed see many IPTV-related domains and IP-addresses. These include nextiptv.org, iptvextrema.com, mercuryiptv.com and many others.

    There are some clear outliers too, including local businesses such as a vacation rental park, painters, a dentist, a pedicure salon, a crane company, and a typically Dutch flower bulbs seller. These and many other sites became unreachable and are still offline today.

    Unrelated flower bulbs company goes offline
    Needless to say, these businesses are not suspects in any way. The sites were hosted on a shared IP-address – assigned to a smaller ‘local’ hosting company – that happened to use GLOBE’s infrastructure. Unfortunately, the damage is real.

    Real Companies, Real Trouble
    From what we can see, the fallout is relatively contained to a few dozen domains. That said, those who are affected still have to deal with the fallout. For several companies, email accounts stopped working as well, causing more issues.

    When confronted with this collateral damage, a FIOD spokesperson initially said that unrelated sites were not supposed to be hit. We were asked us to compile a list of affected websites which we sent via email yesterday. This list actually wasn’t hard to find using public information.

    One of the affected companies informed us today that they were approached by FIOD after the raid, but it’s unclear if and how the situation will be resolved. We approached FIOD for comment and received a response shortly before publication.

    Fiscal Police Responds
    FIOD and the prosecution service (OM) confirmed that the data center was in large part used for illegal purposes. It appears that one of the employees, a suspect in this case, also operated a hosting company for small and mid-sized companies (SMEs).

    “The decision to shut down the data center in question was prompted by the fact that our investigation showed that the majority of the data center consisted of illegal (video streaming) services. On-site investigations confirmed this,” FIOD’s spokesperson says.

    “One of the employees of the data center, also a suspect in the investigation, apparently had the additional function of providing IT services to SMEs. These companies are the victims of the aforementioned illegal main function of the data center, on which FIOD and OM had to act.”

    The data of the innocent companies has not been seized and FIOD encourages the GLOBE employee who operated their hosting company to assist in the recovery of the affected websites.

    “FIOD and OM do their best to ensure that the relevant SMEs have access to their data. The servers on which this data is stored are not seized. FIOD and OM also encourage the aforementioned employee from the data center to represent the interests of these companies,” the FIOD spokesperson said.

    When hundreds of servers are taken offline it is hard to completely rule out collateral damage. The same happened when The Pirate Bay and Megaupload were raided. In this case, however, it seems that more research could have potentially prevented some of the fallout.

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