Thanks Liz
Bookmark- Webzilla, Servers.com,
Alexsej Gubarev his parent company, XBT Holding.
From Servers.ru website
The dossier that has fueled investigations into Russian connections to Donald Trump’s team got a lot right. Indeed, congressional probes and the first guilty plea in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation have shown the document’s suggestions that the Kremlin sought for years to cultivate Trump, that it cozied up to key Trump campaign officials, that it worked to sow division in the U.S. electorate and that the campaign had contacts with Wikileaks have all been on target. Yet among the 35-page dossier’s claims stands one – on the very last page – that is still vexing investigators. It’s the accusation that a company called XBT and its U.S. subsidiary Webzilla hacked the emails of Democratic Party leaders.
“[O]ver the period March-September 2016 a company called XBT/Webzilla and its affiliates had been using botnets and porn traffic to transmit viruses, plant bugs, steal data and conduct ‘altering operations’” against them, according to the dossier, which was prepared by a former British spy who specialized in Russia. XBT and web-hosting company Webzilla, while not well known to the American public, have long been the targets of lawyers who fight Internet piracy. They have claimed, in several lawsuits and submissions to regulators, that Webzilla looks the other way while its customers flagrantly steal copyrighted materials.
None of the lawsuits involve the very specific actions described in the dossier, which was published by Buzzfeed on Jan. 10; XBT has brought defamation suits against the online news site and the document’s author, Christopher Steele, a former MI6 agent. McClatchy consulted a wide range of experts and reviewed more than 1,000 pages of court documents, U.S. Copyright Office filings and corporate registry documents in Cyprus, Singapore, Florida and the United Kingdom to learn more about XBT. That review yields a profile of a company and, specifically, two corporate employees whose legal entanglements underscore just how difficult it will be for investigators to dismiss the dossier’s claims.
Indeed, Webzilla employees were linked through litigation and regulatory filings to two companies accused of large-scale copyright violations involving Hollywood movies and subscription pornography. Pirated pornography is often baited with malware that can affect users’ computers in various ways. “It’s not shocking that Webzilla was listed as a hub for questionable activity. Webzilla is on my radar weekly due to its client base facilitating online piracy on a massive scale,” said Jason Tucker, president of Battleship Stance, a company that manages and investigates copyright infringement for film studios.
Unraveling a Mystery---- XBT is based in Luxembourg but run out of Cyprus, and has seven subsidiaries, including Webzilla. Among the allegations against Webzilla: The International Intellectual Property Association, in a Feb. 9 letter this year to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, complained that Webzilla, as an Internet Service Provider, “serviced and administered” in Cyprus a company called 4shared.com. That’s a file-sharing website that the trade association said draws more requests to remove specific website addresses from search engines than any other in the world. Gurvits insisted that XBT and its subsidiaries had no control of nor access to the website or its data.
Similarly, in joint comments to the U.S. Copyright Office in 2015, 18 music-industry associations complained that Webzilla and an unrelated company routinely fail to take down copyrighted content “despite receiving thousands of notices of infringement.” XBT counters these complaints are misguided, saying Webzilla hosts websites much like AT&T offers customers its telephone network but has no control over the content of calls. “The short answer to it is we have no duty to know,” Valentin Gurvits, XBT’s attorney, with the Boston Legal Group, said in an interview. He added that “100 percent, across the board, I have successfully defended Webzilla against these allegations.”
XBT and its main shareholder have repeatedly offered to open logbooks and take questions from the FBI or U.S. law enforcement but nobody has taken them up on the offer, Gurvits said Thursday. He also branded as frivolous the past lawsuits against XBT and Webzilla.--snip--
MORE AT https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/article184786328.html
Great find!