This morning TorrentFreak was informed of the closure of another long-standing BitTorrent tracker.

Although it doesn’t have the profile of sites like The Pirate Bay, LeechersLair (LL) is a well-established tracker. Launched in 2006, LL has around 18,000 members who enjoy all the usual content. Until today the site was hosted in Malaysia – not any more.

This morning the Content, Consumer and Network Security Division of the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (SKMM) ordered Shinjiru, LeechersLair’s host, to close down the site, citing a breach of Section 41 of the Copyright Act 1987.

SKMM is a government body which enforces the communications and multimedia laws in Malaysia. It informed Shinjiru by faxed letter that if it failed to close LeechersLair, it would be breaking the law. Shinjiru immediately complied and took the site offline.

The government of Malaysia has moved against torrent sites hosted by Shinjiru before, as we reported back in June 2008, but most of them returned elsewhere.

However, there was a worrying development when one of the sysops of another torrent site, tbkresources.org – also hosted at Shinjiru, told TorrentFreak that a hard drive had been attached to their server and it was copying data for use in a copyright infringement case against them. Shinjiru confirmed the report.

At this stage it is unclear if LeechersLair will return, but we will update this post when we have more information. In the meantime other trackers hosted by Shinjiru continue to operate but whether or not they are being monitored is anyone’s guess.

Both Shinjiru and the Malaysian government were given the opportunity to comment, but as yet we’ve received no response.

Source: Government Shuts Down BitTorrent Tracker

This turned out to be a false sense of security though, as the sysop explained. “Two days ago we discovered that an external disk was suddenly mounted on our box (in a quite clumsy way, I might add) 24/7 support didn’t know shit about it, until 2 hours ago when a senior admin confirmed that this disk was attached by their legal department and out of their hands.”

The sysop discovered that there was something wrong, because the server load was extremely high. At first, the support department couldn’t really figure out what was wrong, but after a few messages back and forth, they got this worrying explanation.

Hi,

After investigation on your server, we found that your server is involve with an abuse case on copyright/torrent. Your server was accessed by our local legal party for investigation. This is a sudden action by them, and we not informed earlier. Due to legal party we have no choice but to comply. Kindly contact to our abuse department for further information. Thank you.

Paul C.
Level 2 Support

So, it turns out that – without notification – Shinjiru started to copy data from the BitTorrent tracker for investigation, whatever that may be. It is unsure at this point whether the ISP will hand over the data to authorities, and whether they are doing it with other trackers, but it’s not looking good.

“This is important to get out as they are most probably doing this to every site they know about, and users are being recorded,” the sysop said. “We have destroyed the data on their USB connected disk, destroyed our site backups on it and truncated and deleted all tables, to ensure the protection of our users. As I have stated it was done with out warning nor consent.”

It looks like Shinjiru might have been pressured by the Malaysian government again. However, even then it is still a strange move to copy data from one of their clients, without notice. The sites that are still hosted there need to be aware of this, and take appropriate action. To be continued.

update: Shinjiru confirmed to TorrentFreak that there was indeed an external drive connected to the server, and that “authority on copyright infringement” attempted to copy the data.

Source: ISP Secretly Copies BitTorrent Tracker Data