Cyber attack suspect worked out of ‘bunker’

Spain says a Dutch citizen arrested there on suspicion of launching the biggest cyber attack in history, which disrupted global internet services, operated from a bunker and had a van capable of hacking into networks anywhere in the country.

Investigators say the suspect travelled in Spain using his van “as a mobile computing office, equipped with various antennas to scan frequencies”.

Agents arrested him last week, complying with a European arrest warrant issued by Dutch authorities. He is accused of attacking the anti-span watchdog group Spamhaus.

Spain’s Interior Ministry has now revealed that officers uncovered the computer hacker’s bunker, “from where he even did interviews”.

A source close to the investigation said that suspect SK was 35-year-old Sven Olaf Kamphuis, who acted as a spokesman for Cyberbunker at the time of the attack.

The ministry says he has called himself a diplomat belonging to the “Telecommunications and Foreign Affairs Ministry of the Republic of Cyberbunker”.

Spamhaus, a London and Geneva-based non-profit group which helps weed out unsolicited “spam” messages for email providers, said last month it had been subjected to “distributed denial of service” or DDoS attacks on an unprecedented scale for more than a week.

“(SK) is suspected of unprecedented heavy attacks on the non-profit organisation Spamhaus, where anti- spam databases are managed. These so-called DDoS attacks last month were also performed on Spamhaus partners in the United States, the Netherlands and Great Britain,” the prosecutor’s office said.

The man is expected to be expected to be handed over to the Dutch authorities.

Spamhaus publishes blacklists used by Internet service providers (ISPs) to weed out spam in email traffic.

The group is directly or indirectly responsible for filtering as much as 80% of daily spam messages, according to Cloudflare, a company that said it was helping Spamhaus mitigate the attack.

Spamhaus blamed the attack on Dutch web-hosting service Cyberbunker.

Kamphuis describes himself on his Facebook page as Minister of Telecommunications and Foreign Affairs for the Cyberbunker Republic.

Police declined to speculate on whether further arrests would be made.

Computers, storage devices and mobile phones were seized during the Barcelona raid.

Last month’s attack was described as the most powerful ever seen and slowed web traffic.

Cyberbunker said it had been unfairly labelled as a haven for cybercrime and spam.

Kamphuis was quoted as saying at the time that Spamhaus had put off “a whole lot of people over the past few years by blackmailing ISPs and carriers into disconnecting clients without court orders or legal process whatsoever”.

Experts said the attacks flooded Spamhaus servers with 300 billion bits per second (300 gigabytes) of data.

These DDoS attacks created congestion and ripple effects around the web.