Dutch police seized two VPN servers without explanation

    Recently, two European countries, France and Germany, have declared war on encryption to force large technology companies to integrate encryption backdoors into their secure instant messaging services.

    However, in a neighboring country, the Netherlands, they will actively seek out cyber criminals. And you know how they do it?

    Dutch police seized two servers belonging to the VPN Perfect Privacy provider as part of the investigation, even without providing any reason for the seizure.

    Swiss VPN provider said they learned about the seizure of servers from i3D, a company that provides server hosting in Rotterdam.

    For those unfamiliar, virtual private networks or VPNs are lightweight security and privacy tools that allow you to route Internet traffic through remote servers, protecting your browsing, hiding location data and providing access to blocked resources.

    Virtual private networks have now become an excellent tool not only for large companies, but also for individuals, and can improve privacy and security on the Internet, bypass content restrictions and counter the threats of cyber attacks.

    Although many people, including digital activists, journalists, and protesters, use them for legitimate purposes, virtual private networks are also used by criminals and hackers (so-called black hat hackers) to hide their actions from prying eyes and remain anonymous on the Internet.

    That is why VPN services are often targeted by police and law enforcement agencies when investigating crimes, it seems that this happened with these two servers belonging to Perfect Privacy.

    The VPN provider informed its customers that two servers in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, were seized by the Dutch police on Thursday, August 24, even without trying to contact the company to report a possible investigation or the reason why their servers were seized.

    The VPN provider believes that authorities came directly to i3D with a court order to seize the servers.

    “At present, we do not have any additional information from the moment the law enforcement authorities did not contact us directly, but we were informed by our hoster.” - explains Perfect Privacy. “Because we do not maintain any logs, there is currently no reason to believe that any user data has been compromised.”


    Perfect Privacy confirms that the company recovered the day after i3D provided two servers for replacement, which means that the withdrawal did not affect the quality of service.

    * Free translation of this article

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