A Dutchman has been arrested in Spain in connection with an unprecedented cyberattack that reportedly slowed down the Internet last month, the Dutch prosecution service said.
The Netherlands national prosecution office said a 35-year-old suspect it identified only by his initials, SK, was arrested on Thursday at his home in Barcelona.
He was arrested on suspicion of launching what is described as the biggest cyberattack in internet history operated from a bunker and had a van capable of hacking into networks anywhere in the country.
On parade: Sven Kamphuis with a flag outside his 'CyberBunker' HQ last month
THE ORGANISATION BEHIND THE CHAOS: CYBERBUNKER
CyberBunker, is the organisation accused of slowing down the world wide web and disrupting popular film services such as Netflix.
An anti-spam group has tried to block internet traffic from CyberBunker, which allegedly launched a ‘denial of service’ attack in revenge.
This involves sending billions of megabytes of useless data over the internet to clog it up.
In charge at CyberBunker is Sven Olaf Kamphuis, who styles himself the ‘Minister of Telecommunications and Foreign Affairs’ of the ‘Republic CyberBunker’.
He denied being responsible for the chaos but said he was a spokesman for the culprits.
He claimed the guilty parties were Russian internet service providers unhappy at being on a blacklist drawn up by Spamhaus, a not-for-profit group dedicated to keeping email users’ inboxes clear of unwanted advertisements.
CyberBunker brags on its website that it has been a frequent target for law enforcement agencies because of its controversial customers – it hosts websites for companies offering ‘anything except child porn and terrorism’.
A source close to the investigation told the Telegraph that the suspect S.K. is Sven Olaf Kamphuis, who acted as a spokesman for Cyberbunker at the time of the attack.
The suspect travelled in Spain using his van 'as a mobile computing office, equipped with various antennas to scan frequencies', an interior ministry statement said.
The suspect is accused of attacking the Swiss-British anti-spam watchdog group Spamhaus whose main task is to halt ads for counterfeit Viagra and bogus weight-loss pills reaching the world's inboxes.
The anti-spam group tried to block internet traffic from CyberBunker, which allegedly launched a ‘denial of service’ attack in revenge.
This involves sending billions of megabytes of useless data over the internet to clog it up.
The statement said officers uncovered the computer hacker's bunker, 'from where he even did interviews with different international media'.
The statement said the suspect called himself a diplomat belonging to the 'Telecommunications and Foreign Affairs Ministry of the Republic of Cyberbunker'.
Spanish police were alerted in March by Dutch authorities of large denial-of-service attacks being launched from Spain that were affecting internet servers in the Netherlands, United Kingdom and the US.
These attacks culminated with a major onslaught on Spamhaus.
The Netherlands National Prosecution Office described them as 'unprecedentedly serious attacks on the nonprofit organisation Spamhaus'.
The largest assault clocked in at 300 billion bits per second, according to San Francisco-based CloudFlare, which Spamhaus enlisted to help it weather the onslaught.
Cyber-attack: Dutch firm SpamHaus, headed by Steve Linford pictured left, was targeted in an attack so big that 'bystanders worldwide' were apparently affected
A RISING TIDE OF ONLINE CRIME
1,000 cyber crimes are thought to target Britain every hour
£27bn is the cost of cybercrime in the UK every year
30 government department are succesfully jacked in one attack last year
£2.2bn the cost to the UK government of cyber crime each year
12.8% is the rise in the number of spam emails last month alone
£1.7bn the cost of online ID fraud in the UK each year
£3,000 the cost of basic malicious software designed to steal bank details
Denial-of-service attacks overwhelm a server with traffic, jamming it with incoming messages. Security experts measure the attacks in bits of data per second.
Recent cyberattacks - such as the ones that caused persistent outages at US banking sites late last year - have tended to peak at 100 billion bits per second, one third the size of that experienced by Spamhaus.
Netherlands, German, British and US police forces took part in the investigation leading to the arrest, Spain said.
The suspect is expected to be extradited from Spain to face justice in the Netherlands.
Olaf Kamphuis claimed the guilty parties were Russian internet service providers unhappy at being on a blacklist drawn up by Spamhaus, a not-for-profit group dedicated to keeping email users’ inboxes clear of unwanted advertisements.
Speaking on a videolink from inside his nerve centre last month Mr Kamphuis said: ‘It’s not us. It’s a collective of a lot of people and internet providers. I doubt the people doing the attacks can be found.’
He accused Spamhaus of censorship and said: ‘We are aware that this is one of the largest [cyber] attacks the world had publicly seen.
‘Nobody ever deputised Spamhaus to determine what goes, and does not go, on the internet.’
Mr Kamphuis even claims the Israeli secret service Mossad tried to blow up his car in 2010 in a dispute over his web service Pirate Bay, which was accused of copyright infringement.
After a court granted an injunction against him and Pirate Bay he claims Mossad targeted his car as a warning. ‘My car did not decide explode on its own,’ he said.
The Cyberbunker headquarters in Kloetinge, Netherlands, from which the 'biggest cyber attack in history', has been launched
Cyberbunker, is based at an ex-Nato bunker, is what is known as a hosting company, meaning it allows organisations to make their websites accessible on the internet by providing space on a server