Ukraine File-Sharing Site Taken Down By Authorities

Authorities have taken down another popular file-sharing site that you’ve never heard of – it’s in the Ukraine. TorrentFreak broke the story that Ukranian feds have taken down popular sharin...
Ukraine File-Sharing Site Taken Down By Authorities
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Authorities have taken down another popular file-sharing site that you’ve never heard of – it’s in the Ukraine.

TorrentFreak broke the story that Ukranian feds have taken down popular sharing site Ex.ua. The site was reported to have millions of users. Several international companies like Microsoft, Graphisoft and Adobe filed complaints against the service which led to raid today after a six-month criminal investigation.

A spokesperson for the authorities confirmed that 200 servers were taken, holding a mind-blowing 6 petabytes of data. For those just joining us, that’s 6,000 terabytes of data.

Sixteen employees were taken into custody for questioning. It’s unclear if any arrests have been made, but the authorities did confirm that the site was run by a Latvian citizen.

Ex.ua was similar to MegaUpload, which was taken down just two weeks ago, but TorrentFreak points out a few key differences. Ex.ua allowed users to search for content on their site in categories like ‘MP3’ and ‘Video,’ MegaUpload did not.

The RIAA labeled Ex.ua as a “pirate haven” in 2010 in a complaint filed with the U.S. Trade Representative. Their main beef was that the Web site allowed users to directly search for content.

The operators of the site face up to five years in prison if found guilty.

Reuters is reporting that just like with MegaUpload, the Internet has not taken the news of the take down softly.

Ukrainians bombarded government Web sites with DDoS attacks that took down the president’s Web site alongside the Web site for the Interior Ministry.

A government spokesperson confirmed that the Web sites had been attacked. They also confirmed that the call to attack government Web sites was being spread over social networks “in the name of supporting file-sharing Web sites that do not observe copyright laws.”

The attack does not appear to be an officially sanctioned Anonymous attack, but just bitter users of the Web site. The hashtag #OpExua returns little results as well.

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