Dutch bunker (CB-1) In 1995, Herman-Johan Xennt bought a bunker just outside the small town of
Kloetinge in the south of the Netherlands, which had been formerly used by
NATO, and was built in 1955. The bunker, originally used as a wartime Provincial Military Command Center () of the
Dutch military, was built to withstand a
nuclear attack. The bunker was de-assessed by the Dutch military in 1994. With collaborators, Xennt formed the CyberBunker company within the bunker, to offer "
bulletproof hosting" of web sites. In 2002, a fire broke out in the Dutch bunker. After the fire was put out, it was discovered that besides Internet hosting services, an
MDMA laboratory was in operation. Following the fire the local town denied the company a business license, resulting in the CyberBunker servers being moved to above-ground locations, including
Amsterdam. In its publicity, the company continued to claim that it operated from the bunker.
Businessweek reported them as stating that the bunker was "full of junk" when they acquired it, and quoted Guido Blaauw, their general manager, as stating that the CyberBunker publicity material was "all
Photoshop".
The Pirate Bay In October 2009
BitTorrent tracker The Pirate Bay, which had been subjected to legal action by various anti-
piracy groups including
Dutch copyright organisation
BREIN, moved away from Sweden to CyberBunker. In 2010 the
Hamburg district court ruled that CyberBunker, operating in Germany as
CB3Rob Ltd & Co KG, was no longer allowed to host The Pirate Bay, being subject to a
€250,000 fine or up to two years' imprisonment for each infringement. In March 2013, Spamhaus added CyberBunker to its blacklist. Shortly afterwards a
distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack of previously unreported scale (peaking at 300
Gbit/s; an average large-scale attack is often around 50 Gbit/s, while the largest known previously publicly reported attack was 100 Gbit/s) was launched against Spamhaus email and web servers using a
Domain Name System (DNS) amplification attack; the attack had lasted for over a week. Steve Linford, chief executive for Spamhaus, said that they had withstood the attack. Other companies, such as
Google, had made their resources available to help absorb the traffic. On 25 April 2013, Sven Olaf Kamphuis, a vocal spokesman for CyberBunker, was arrested at the request of Dutch authorities near
Barcelona by
Spanish Police after collaboration through
Eurojust. An anonymous press release uploaded on
Pastebin.com the following day demanding the release of Kamphuis threatened more large-scale attacks should he remain in custody. The Spanish authorities reported that Kamphuis operated from a well-equipped bunker and used a van as a mobile computing office. No further information on this bunker was provided. In September 2013, it was revealed that a second arrest had been made in April in relation to the Spamhaus attack, the suspect being a 16-year-old from
London. Kamphuis was held for 55 days awaiting extradition to the Netherlands and was later found guilty and sentenced to 240 days in prison. His sentence was suspended, with credit for the 55 days served.
Traben-Trarbach bunker (CB-3) In 2013, the company purchased its second bunker in
Traben-Trarbach, Germany. The Irish criminal
George Mitchell, who lived for a while in Traben-Trarbach, approached Xennt about running an encrypted phone business. In September 2019, 600 German police officers raided the bunker. Police later said that the bunker was the location from which a late 2016 denial of service attack on
Deutsche Telekom had been launched. == Documentary ==