Newzleech.com, one of the better free Usenet indexing services that provided NZB files has been down now since the 19th November due to an incident involving the Ukrainian Police and Security Services. Below is the message from the site admin, it currently resides as the index page of Newzleech.com.
Update: On 19/11/2009 Newzleech's host in Ukraine Colocall got raided by the country's secret service. Newzleech wasn't targeted specifically. Every server in the building was removed as part of an unrelated criminal case. Why they took every server nobody knows. Lots of legitimate Ukrainian businesses have been affected. In case you're worried there was zero logs on the server so don't worry about that.
Unfortunately there isn't a recent backup on the server scripts. I am currently rebuilding the site from the old backups that I have. Please be patient while the site is being rebuilt. We should be back before the end of the year.
Sorry for the lack of updates.
-K
Newzleech have their hosting/colocation with a Ukrainian company called ColoCall, who have released a statement on their Ukrainian language site. Unfortunately, our Ukrainian isn't the exactly the best (or in fact existent at all) but thanks to the wondrous Google Translate we can give you our (rough) version of what the statement says in English:
19 November 2009. At about 10 o'clock in the morning, Ukrainian Security Service officers raided our data centre in Dnipropetrovsk in relation to an ongoing enquiry with one of our clients, "Fregat". During the raid, hundreds of units of equipment owned by our company and our clients were taken for forensics. We are currently working on granting victims access to alternative servers and talking with all the parties involved regarding refunds and restoration of equipment. We apologise to our partners and client for this incident.
To see the statement for yourself, click here.
The good news is that the raid was not targeting Newzleech themselves; they have just been caught up in something they shouldn't have. Unfortunately, as quoted above, the site admin had no recent backups of the actual scripts which kept Newzleech running and therefore these will probably require partial rewriting if the site is to come back any time soon. Fingers crossed they'll be back by the end of the year as announced (baring in mind we're only really 4 weeks away from that).
We'll keep you updated on the situation as it progresses.
4 Comments
That is. Never host any serious sites in Ukraine. Ever.
Sorry to say that I wont be using newzleech any more even if it does come back, as it was always going down, so in some ways its good its gone as there are much better reliable sites out there. If it does come back it needs to be much better and more reliable. We were told it would be back at the end of the year, its now almost March, so what year did it mean ???. All the site address says is to use Binsearch, sorry but that's not very good either, why not put up some useful information. sorry, now removed from my favourites. bye Newzleech.
Site came back online yesterday, rejoice.
Cheers for the heads up scorch, writing an article on it now.