# CyberBunker A notorious **[[Bulletproof Hosting]]** operation that literally ran from decommissioned military bunkers — first in the Netherlands, later in Germany — advertising that it would host anything "except child pornography and terrorism." Its slogan and its physical fortress made it the most theatrical example of the takedown-resistant-hosting business, and its two incarnations bracket a decade of cybercrime infrastructure. ## CyberBunker 1.0 — the Netherlands and the Spamhaus attack The original CyberBunker operated from a former NATO bunker in the Netherlands and hosted clients that legitimate providers refused. In March 2013, after the spam-tracking nonprofit **Spamhaus** added CyberBunker to its blacklist, a retaliatory **distributed-denial-of-service attack** of then-unprecedented scale (peaking around 300 Gbit/s, using DNS amplification) was launched against Spamhaus — an event widely dubbed "the attack that almost broke the internet." **Sven Olaf Kamphuis**, CyberBunker's vocal spokesman, was arrested in Spain in April 2013 and later convicted, receiving a largely suspended sentence. ## CyberBunker 2.0 — the German bunker The operation relocated to a five-story former NATO bunker in **Traben-Trarbach, Germany**, bought by the Dutch operator **Herman Johan Xennt**. In **September 2019**, around 600 German police stormed the facility — breaking through an iron door into the temperature-controlled complex — and seized roughly 200 servers. The bunker had been hosting a roster of darknet marketplaces (drugs, weapons, stolen data, counterfeit documents) and other illicit content. ## The landmark verdict In **December 2021**, a German court convicted eight defendants of **forming a criminal organization** — but notably **acquitted them of aiding and abetting** the specific crimes committed on their servers. The split verdict, in what was called Germany's largest cybercrime trial, crystallized the hard legal question at the center of bulletproof hosting: when (and how) can an infrastructure provider be held criminally responsible for what its customers do? The case remains a key reference point in the debate over intermediary liability. ## Right-wing-KB relevance CyberBunker is the vivid, physical face of the criminal-infrastructure layer this knowledge base tracks — and a case study in why takedowns are so hard. Where the [[Russian Business Network]] illustrates the *state-harbored* model of bulletproof hosting, CyberBunker illustrates the *jurisdictional-and-legal* version operating inside Europe, and the unresolved question of provider liability that lets such operations persist. It is also a direct, named example of the [[Bulletproof Hosting]] phenomenon that underpins ransomware, darknet markets, and disinformation infrastructure. ## See Also - [[Bulletproof Hosting]] - [[Russian Business Network]] - [[Cybersecurity Lexicon]]