CyberBunker: Hacking as Performance Art

On Friday, March 15, one of the largest cyberattacks ever hit the website of Spamhaus, a European antispam group. That evening a massive data stream began flooding its site and those of other victims at a pace that eventually peaked at 300 billion bits per second, several times the size of the attacks against the websites of U.S. banks in late December and early January. As Spamhaus’s website crashed, reports of the hack began lighting up the Web, as did concerns that its unprecedented size would overwhelm the Internet itself. The following Monday, still offline, Spamhaus reached out to CloudFlare, a San Francisco-based security company. Spamhaus was finally up and running by the end of that day.

The attack was payback for Spamhaus blacklisting a handful of accused spammers who were clients of a firm known as CyberBunker, the website for a digital hosting company called cb3rob claims to work out of a Cold War-era nuclear bunker somewhere in the Netherlands. Sven Olaf Kamphuis, 35, a self-described Internet activist affiliated with CyberBunker, took credit for helping orchestrate the siege. In a post on his Facebook page, Kamphuis accused Spamhaus of trying “to control the Internet through underhanded extortion tactics.”