Thread: BREIN takes down topsite Swan

BREIN has put out a release claiming that it has taken out the top site "Swan". As it turns out, Swan isn't just any top site, rather it was the largest site ever taken down. Top sites are much different than P2P or BitTorrent sites, as they are only accessible by the elite, or 1337, users who belong to the upper strata of the Internet social hierarchy. The remaining peons are little more than P2P commoners.

Here are some of the stats belonging to this rather large top site:

"Today Dutch anti-piracy organization BREIN took down the top site Swan (formerly known as ATS) in cooperation with hosting provider Worldstream. Swan is the largest top site that has been taken down ever, it contained more than 220 terabyte of copyright protected films, TV series, games, music, software and digital books. "One terabyte is 1000 gigabyte, that is for example 250 films or games or 25,000 songs, this site had 220 times as much", says BREIN director Tim Kuik. Swan had 12 servers with 142 hard discs. BREIN estimates the new purchase value of the hardware it took possession of at around 95,000 euro."

Apparently BREIN had the help of the top site's web host, who cooperated in not only bringing the site down but providing the identity of the individual to BREIN.

"Worldstream cooperated in the removal of the servers which they handed over to BREIN. According to the available data the owner/operator of Swan would be from Latin America. Further investigation will take place but he can present himself to BREIN if he wants to. In the meantime we advised him per e-mail of the situation", says Kuik.



Top sites, or at least some of them, are responsible for the initial introduction of warez into the file distribution ecosystem. From there, warez trickle down to other, more public methods of file distribution; at which time mere mortals are graciously exposed to the good will and hard work of the upper echelons of the Internet caste system.

Slyck News - BREIN Claims to have taken down Swan - the Largest Top Site 'Ever'

Brein - BREIN haalt grootste top site ooit offline

95,000 worth of hardware! Now I know the scene says they don't make money and they don't sell anything including p2l boxes, but damn who else has that kind of expendable money unless they hacked into these computers.

Also good luck Brein taking down all the topsites, one topsite no matter how big is just a drop in the bucket. Grabs them good press sure, maybe lands a few kids in jail. Scene will just dump and race from somewhere else, security will be tightened up, and p2p will still get their torrents. Nothing changed.

Originally Posted by Veritas

I`m such a tiny ant.. never heard of that SWAN !!! Anyway a HUGE lost !!

Not surprising, they are very tight on security so not many people outside the scene know about topsites. Its like certain torrent sites that try to hide their identity by forbidding their members to talk about their full name, only topsites are much better at it.

And I agree with Gamesover, these kind of takedowns are hardly more than a publicity stunt for the copyright lobby. For every site they take down, new better ones will take its place.

So that's what Swan is. I'd seen the name once before in a high class user forum on a torrent site but never found out what it was.

Too little too late I guess haha! but as it did with OiNK and even though this isn't bitorrent (I know the Hydra isn't a bit torrent creation :P) the Hydra will take over and a new site will spring up. It probably already has.

there are 27 ranked topsites and swan wasn't ranked.