Cyberbunker’s Sven Kamphuis denies unleashing DDoS attacks on Spamhaus
The internet activist accused of being behind one of the biggest distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks to date, claims he is the victim of an establishment conspiracy.
Investigators have accused Dutch internet operator Sven Kamphuis of unleashing DDoSattacks in support of web hosting company Cyberbunker after it was blacklisted by anti-spam website Spamhaus.
But Kamphuis said the allegations against him were caused by the row between his company Cyberbunker and Spamhaus, according to the Telegraph.
The row erupted after Spamhaus blocked servers maintained by Cyberbunker, which in turn accused the non-profit content filtering organisation of “abusing its influence” as a self-appointed censor.
DDoS attacks typically flood the intended target with large amounts of network traffic in an attempt to render it unreachable.
Last week, Spamhaus was bombarded with 300Gbps, slowing internet connections in some parts of Europe, although thinkbroadband’s latest speed tests showed no major slowdown in the UK.
Dutch police were investigating allegations that Kamphuis was waging the attacks from a former Nato nuclear command centre in Kloetinge, southern Netherlands.
But the bunker is undergoing renovation, and its owner, BunkerInfo, is irate at the suggestions that Kamphuis had mounted his attack from its facility, the Telegraph said.
“I'm not worried. We haven't done anything wrong and I am not in the Netherlands,” Kamphuis told the paper, which said he appeared to be operating out of Barcelona in Spain.
Initial reports blamed the DDoS attacks on a group calling itself STOPhaus – an alliance of hactivists and cyber criminals.
Regardless of who is responsible, the attacks on Spamhaus have highlighted inherent weaknesses in the crucial domain name system (DNS) that underpins the internet.
Experts have been warning for some time that flooding the DNS with traffic could bring down the internet by making it inaccessible to users.
According to Spamhaus’s Steve Linford, few organisations would be able to withstand the magnitude of DDoS attacks that have been unleashed against it.
He said Spamhaus had been able to cope because it has highly distributed infrastructure in a number of countries and it is supported by some of the world's largest internet companies, which rely on it to filter unwanted material.
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