Piraten Partei

German police seized several servers belonging to Germany's Pirate Party Friday morning as part of an investigation into a cyberattack on the French energy group EDF, the party said in a statement.


The political party itself was not the target of the 9:15 a.m. raid of a hosting site in Offenbach, Germany, according to the Pirate Party. Instead, the confiscation of servers hosted by AixIT was part of an investigation in conjunction with French authorities into denial-of-service attacks that bear the hallmarks of the loose hacking organization calling itself "Anonymous."

Police, armed with a warrant, seized computers used for the Pirate Party's collaborative document drafting service, Piratepad, according the party's German-language statement, as translated by the TorrentFreak blog.

Investigators believe Piratepad was employed by unnamed users of the service to plan DDoS attacks on EDF. The Pirate Party's board of directors said it was cooperating with investigators and was not the subject of the investigation.

"At the moment, the Board does not expect delinquency on behalf of the Pirate Party. The investigation is not directed against the party or any of its subsidiaries, they are only involved as the server's operators. The results are awaited with curiosity," the Party said in Friday's statement.

After news of the raid broke, servers belonging to German police were also attacked, according to TorrentFreak. The Pirate Party, in a follow-up statement, also denied any involvement in those attacks.

The party complained about the timing of the raid, as it is contesting an election in Bremen this Sunday.