14 DAY TRIAL // In another case of "We're the police, and we do whatever we like," Dutch authorities seized two servers belonging to Perfect Privacy, a Switzerland-based VPN provider.
Perfect Privacy says they found out about the server seizure from I3D, the company that provides server hosting in the city of Rotterdam.
The VPN provider says that no member of the Dutch police contacted the company to inform them about a possible investigation or the reason why their servers were confiscated.
Police seized two of three Perfect Privacy Rotterdam servers. This happened on Thursday, August 24, but the company was back up and running the following day after I3D provided replacement servers.
"Since we are not logging any data there is currently no reason to believe that any user data was compromised," Perfect Privacy explained to customers when it heard about the incident from I3D.
Dutch police has a habit of going after privacy tools
It is not clear why Dutch police seized the servers, but VPN connections are often used to commit cyber-crimes. They are also used by people wanting to protect their privacy, for torrenting, or for connecting to private enterprise networks.
Back in April, Dutch police forced Ennetcom to shut down operations. Ennetcom was a company that provided encryption communications for mobile devices. Authorities accused it of harboring and helping criminals carry out crimes by protecting their communications.
Softpedia has reached out to Perfect Privacy and inquired about any updates. The company has not responded in time for this article's publication.
UPDATE: We have received the following email from Perfect Privacy's Lars Mueller, still with little information:
“ The Dutch police still did not contact us and we have no idea why the servers have been seized. The seizure is also pretty pointless because we obviously do not log, so there is nothing to find on theses servers. We did however rebuild all cryptographic keys for the rotterdam location, just in case they tried a cold boot attack on the running system to extract keys. But this attack is very unlikely, the police took the system nearly 12 hours after it was disconnected from the internet. Thanks to the good cooperation with our hoster I3d new servers were up and running in less than 18 hour. ”
Two of our servers in Rotterdam have been seized: https://t.co/6gpvNcGBrG Currently no reason to believe that any user data was compromised. — Perfect Privacy (@perfectprivacy) August 24, 2016
Our Rotterdam location is back online with all three servers. Thank you @i3D_net for the nice and professional assistance in this matter. — Perfect Privacy (@perfectprivacy) August 25, 2016