CyberBunker

» see cyberbunker.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Nobody downloading anything in the 2000s thought about where it was physically sitting. A site was a name, and the name either resolved or it did not, and if it stopped resolving you found another one the same afternoon. CyberBunker is the answer to a question almost none of us asked, which is what it actually looks like when a host decides in advance that it is never taking anything down.

It looks like a bunker. Herman-Johan Xennt bought a twenty thousand square foot Dutch military command center outside Kloetinge in the mid-nineties, a 1955 concrete box built to keep a provincial command running through a nuclear exchange, and put racks in it. The name came from the building. The pitch came from the building too. Accounts differ on the founding year, with the company's own telling putting it at 1996 and most English write-ups saying 1995, and the data center itself did not come online until 2000.

The customers were the ones you would expect from a company that advertised what this one advertised. The Pirate Bay ran there, alongside WikiLeaks mirrors and a quantity of spam and botnet infrastructure nobody has ever finished counting. The whole operation was wrapped in a kind of performance art, with its spokesman Sven Olaf Kamphuis calling the company the Republic of CyberBunker and himself its Minister of Telecommunications and Foreign Affairs.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what bulletproof meant ~

Bulletproof hosting is a plain commercial category with a dramatic name. It means the provider will not act on an abuse complaint, and will keep your box running while its own lawyers absorb whatever arrives in the post. Everyone in the business knows the term. CyberBunker's particular version was that it would take anything on earth except child pornography and anything connected to terrorism, and it said so in public, repeatedly, as marketing.

There was a fire in the Dutch bunker in 2002 and a drug lab was found in a sublet part of it. The building was sold in 2010 to a legitimate data center company, which put out a press release in March 2013 stating flatly that CyberBunker had not operated from the bunker since the fire. The company kept telling customers it did. The bunker had stopped being a place and had become a brochure.

~ the spamhaus week ~

In March 2013 the anti-spam organization Spamhaus put CyberBunker on a blocklist, and what came back was a DNS amplification attack that peaked around 300 Gbit/s and ran for over a week. At the time it was the largest publicly known attack of its kind, and it was written up in the general press with headlines about the internet slowing down worldwide, which was an exaggeration, though not by as much as people later liked to pretend.

Kamphuis was arrested near Barcelona on 25 April 2013 at the request of Dutch authorities. He was held 55 days awaiting extradition and eventually got a 240 day sentence that was suspended with credit for time already served. A sixteen year old in London was arrested in connection with the same attack. The company carried on.

~ the day it died ~

CyberBunker bought a second bunker on 26 June 2013, a five story underground facility at the former Mont Royal barracks in Traben-Trarbach on the Mosel. German police had a warrant to tap its traffic by 2015. The investigation ran four more years, and during it the police put an undercover gardener and a cleaning lady inside the building.

On 26 September 2019 around six hundred officers went in, with parallel raids running in three other countries. Seven people were arrested, none of them at the site, because the crew had been lured out beforehand. More than two hundred servers came out along with roughly forty one million dollars linked to the markets running on them. Prosecutors counted something close to a quarter of a million offenses. Police also said child abuse material had been hosted there, which was one of the two categories the company had spent twenty years saying it refused.

~ the funny part ~

On 13 December 2021 the court in Trier convicted eight defendants of forming and belonging to a criminal organization. Xennt got five years and nine months, and the rest landed somewhere between a suspended year and four years and three months. Every one of them was acquitted of aiding the crimes actually committed on the servers, which is to say the court found that running the bunker was the offense and that what the customers did with it legally was not.

Xennt was released on parole at the end of September 2023 after serving two thirds. Netflix put out a documentary about the whole thing the same year, and Xennt sat for an interview in it alongside the prosecutor who put him away. The bunker went up for sale. The listing suggested it would make a good cheese cellar.

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