Newzleech Servers Seized By Ukranian Secret Service

Popular Usenet site Newzleech has been down for several weeks now, with no public word as to the cause. It now appears their host was targeted by Ukraine’s secret service. Read on for some alternative sites until Newzleech returns.

Newzleech has been one of the more popular Usenet/NZB sites for some time, so when it disappeared a few weeks ago, many users were left thinking the worst.

It now appears that Newzleech’s host, the Ukraine-based Colocall, was subjected to a raid by Sluzhba Bespeky Ukrayiny (SBU) – the country’s secret service.

In an announcement the owners of Newleech said that the site wasn’t targeted specifically, but did have their servers seized along with all the others in the building as part of an unrelated criminal case.

There is also some good news, and some bad news to report.

The good news is that there were no user logs held on the server. The bad news is that there were also no recent backups of the server scripts either, so everything is going to have to be rebuilt.

Newzleech hopes to return by the end of the year, in the meantime a few useful sites are Binsearch, NZBmatrix, NZBindex and Merlins-Portal, particularly since NZBsRus is also down for maintenance after a DDoS attack.

Feel free to post other free to use Usenet search/NZB sites in the comments.