Malaysian ISP Records Torrent Tracker Traffic

Shinjiru is an Internet service provider (ISP) from Malaysia that succumbed to pressure from the Government last month and consequently shut down the web pages of several BitTorrent trackers. Although most of these sites are now up and running as if nothing ever happened, TorrentFreak has discovered that Shinjiru is secretly monitoring the activity of several torrent sites.

A sysop from tbkresources.org became suspicious when he discovered that "an external disk was suddenly mounted on our box." Curious to find out the purpose of the disk, the sysop contacted Shinjiru's customer support, but they could not provide an explanation. It was later revealed that the Shinjiru legal team had installed the previously mentioned disk, but nobody seems to know the exact reason for that.

It would seem that Shinjiru believes these torrent trackers are in breach of current legislation, copyright infringement to be more precise, has launched an investigation, and copying data from the servers is part of said investigation. The curious thing is that the ISP is doing all of this in secrecy, trying not to draw any attention to its actions.


"This is important to get out as they are most probably doing this to every site they know about, and users are being recorded. 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," says the sysop as cited by TorrentFreak.

Because the Malaysian Government was to blame for the recent tracker shut down, it is believed that it is behind the current situation as well. But since the ISP is copying data from its own clients, it should have first issued a warning, or at least an informative note about its plans. An official reply from the Malaysian ISP has yet to be released to the public.

[Source: softpedia]

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