CyberBunker

The former NATO bunker in Zeeland that housed CyberBunker.
Entrance to the CyberBunker bunker.

CyberBunker was an Internet service provider located in the Netherlands and Germany that, according to its website, "hosted services to any website except child pornography and anything related to terrorism". The company first operated in a former NATO bunker in Zeeland, and later in another former NATO bunker in Traben-Trarbach, Germany.

CyberBunker served as a web host for The Pirate Bay and as one of the many WikiLeaks mirrors.[1] CyberBunker has also been accused of being a host for spammers, botnet command-and-control servers, malware, and online scams.[2] The company has also been involved in Border Gateway Protocol hijacks of IP addresses used by Spamhaus and the United States Department of Defense.[3] The Spamhaus hijack was part of an exceptionally large distributed denial of service attack launched against them in March 2013. Because of the size of this attack it received considerable mainstream media attention.

The company is named for its initial location in a former Cold War bunker.[4] As of 2013, CyberBunker listed its address as the bunker, but the location of CyberBunker's servers was unclear.[5] Sven Olaf Kamphuis referred to CyberBunker as the Republic of CyberBunker and referred to himself as the Minister of Telecommunications and Foreign Affairs.[6][7]

In September 2019, the German police stormed and shut down the company's operations in its bunker in Traben-Trarbach. Seven suspects were arrested.[8]

  1. ^ "CyberBunker prohibited from providing internet access to The Pirate Bay" (PDF). Motion Picture Association of America. 13 May 2010. Archived from the original (PDF) on 1 June 2010. Retrieved 29 April 2014.
  2. ^ Spamhaus.org - listings for IPs under the responsibility of cb3rob.net Archived 30 August 2019 at the Wayback Machine, records retrieved 28 April 2013.
  3. ^ BGPMon.net Looking at the spamhaus DDOS from a BGP perspective Archived 5 August 2019 at the Wayback Machine, article retrieved 29 April 2013.
  4. ^ "CyberBunker datacentrum in Goes · DatacentrumGids.nl". Archived from the original on 23 January 2010.
  5. ^ Pfanner, Eric; O'Brien, Kevin J. (29 March 2013). "Provocateur Comes Into View After Cyberattack". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 30 March 2013. Retrieved 30 March 2013. ... CyberBunker still lists its address as the bunker. But Joost Verboom, a Dutch businessman, says the address is occupied by his own company, BunkerInfra Datacenters, which is building a subterranean Web hosting center at the site. Mr. Verboom said CyberBunker and Mr. Kamphuis left the site a decade ago. It is not clear where the servers of CyberBunker and CB3ROB are now. ...
  6. ^ Brown, Stuart S.; Hermann, Margaret G. (29 October 2019). Transnational Crime and Black Spots: Rethinking Sovereignty and the Global Economy. Springer. ISBN 978-1-137-49670-6. Archived from the original on 17 April 2024. Retrieved 17 April 2024.
  7. ^ Pfanner, Eric; O'Brien, Kevin (30 March 2013). "Provocateur Comes Into View After Cyberattack". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 30 March 2013. Retrieved 26 February 2017.
  8. ^ "Mit 650 Einsatzkräften Cyberbunker in Traben-Trarbach gestürmt". rheinpfalz.de (in German). Archived from the original on 27 September 2019. Retrieved 27 September 2019.