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Germany shuts down illegal data center in former NATO bunker
- not_a_cop75 7y agoHas right to be forgotten taken over?
- ryanlol 7y agoThis appears to be cyberbunker/cb3rob http://www.cb3rob.org/ http://www.cb3rob.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberBunker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberBunker It's not exactly their first rodeo, but certainly the most significant challenge so far. FWIW I've hosted with these guys before and used their servers for scanning the internet, they did not allow that.
- silvester23 7y agoI'm surprised at how theatrical the notice of seizure is. Would not have expected that from our usually exceedingly sober law enforcement.
- Avamander 7y agoIt looks incredibly fake. I wonder if there's a collection somewhere of these real website seizure notices.
- NeedMoreTea 7y agoPerfectly in keeping with current seizure notices. The current fashion seems to go completely overboard with agency badging. The couple of UK ones I saw crop up recently have a cliche "hacker in hat and trench coat" silhouette on similar blue backdrop, in place of the Matrix world map thing. https://www.pcmag.com/news/366221/feds-shut-down-marketplace-for-selling-access-to-hacked-serv https://www.pcmag.com/news/366221/feds-shut-down-marketplace...
- Vespasian 7y agoInteresting that the Belgian Federal Computer Crime Unit has a unicorn in its logo.
- LyndsySimon 7y agoI believe that in heraldry, the unicorn is symbolic of courage. Maybe that’s why?
- groby_b 7y agoIt has also seals of Swedish and Luxembourgois police on there, so I'd wager that's the note they put up themselves, not law enforcement.
- kmlx 7y agothat background reminds me of the matrix
- magashna 7y agoIt's pretty common, sometimes you'll see multiple countries claiming the takedown and have a few different crests.
- equalunique 7y ago>In September 2019, the German police stormed and shut down a data center in a bunker near Traben-Trarbach, which is also supposed to belong to the company. Seven suspects were arrested.[9] Almost all sites of the website are not longer accessible since then. I have long time family friends who were working at that Trauben-Trarbach datacenter since at least 2015. I pray and hope they are ok.
- ivankolev 7y agoYet again life is providing more "entertainment" than in the movies. Pics please?
- aaron695 7y agoNightvision makes it kinda Hollywoody - https://www.bild.de/regional/frankfurt/frankfurt-aktuell/sieben-cyberkriminelle-festgenommen-was-geschah-im-nato-bunker-64982170.bild.html https://www.bild.de/regional/frankfurt/frankfurt-aktuell/sie...
- pergadad 7y agoPaywalled Link to Germany's worst tabloid
- mitjam 7y agoHere are some pics also from the inside and a short video: https://www.rheinpfalz.de/lokal/artikel/rheinland-pfalz-lka-stuermt-rechenzentrum-in-altem-nato-bunker-mit-bilderstrecke-videos/ https://www.rheinpfalz.de/lokal/artikel/rheinland-pfalz-lka-...
- equalunique 7y agoI've been inside there. That glowing computer with many screens - I've stood right there in that very same spot. On the wall in that room is a big map of Afganistan, a place NATO was gathering intelligence on while the Soviets were invading long ago. The pics show about 10% of the facility... I remember when that datacenter part was still under construction, back in 2015.
- PeterStuer 7y agoWould you not need an even larger legitimate datacenter to hide the operations of the illegal datacenter? I'm guessing the huge power draw from the grid and the redundant fiber trunks going to an old bunker will draw suspicions that somehow would need to be explained?
- ryanlol 7y agoCyberbunker was always an odd one, they operated very openly. The existence of their bulletproof hosting business and it's curious location was never any secret.
- breakingcups 7y agoFor a long time CB claimed to still be hosted in the Dutch bunker even though they vacated long ago.
- rbanffy 7y agoIt can draw attention, but until the police has a reasonable excuse to look into the building, they can't.
- wongarsu 7y agoIn principle all these bunkers are designed to be able to run on diesel generators, in some cases for 10+ years. I imagine the power requirements of a 1950s communications bunker and a modern datacenter are not too far apart. But in reality it probably doesn't matter, I doubt you can get a search warrant based on "they use a lot of power and have great internet connection"
- hollander 7y agoSo how much diesel do you have to store for doing that 10 years? The only problem I see is that if you cut the cable, the data center has no value anymore. And that cable has to be connected somewhere to the normal grid.
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- rbanffy 7y agoFrom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberBunker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberBunker "In 2002, a fire broke out in the bunker from which they operated. After the fire was put out, it was discovered that besides internet hosting services, an MDMA laboratory was in operation" Wow
- qwerty456127 7y agoI just hope this won't harm the actual availability of MDMA much. According to my experience, an evening spent on MDMA together with wife, talking and having sex (with help of viagra - erection is miserable on MDMA without it even if you are perfectly healthy) is worth by orders of magnitude more than years of psychotherapy or vacations. It's a miracle drug if used properly (incl. taking lots of strong antioxidants before it and never taking it more often than once in some months). It also makes my arrhythmia-prone heart work like a Swiss clockwork, it's the only substance that can stop a heart attack reliably, the substances the doctor has prescribed me (e.g. propafenone) do nothing but make my heart attacks much much more frequent.
- decebalus1 7y ago> nothing but make my heart attacks much much more frequent. What the hell? Pardon my ignorance but how many heart attacks is too frequent? I was under the impression that one or two is pretty much all a human body can take.
- langseth 7y agoMy guess is they are using "heart attack" as a general term. My boss at my previous job had a genetic disease that caused heart arrhythmia's frequently. They were not life threatening if handled in time, he had an internal defibrillator(?) that would trigger a shock to correct the problem in the worst case. Most of the time he would have someone drive him to the hospital (1-2 hours away) to have it reset in a controlled environment Eventually he made several corrections to his lifestyle that reduced the number of attacks considerably and volunteered for several corrective procedures to fix the problem (He wanted his son to be able to live without the risks) last I heard he had the defibrillator removed after a surgery at the Mayo Clinic, diet changes (no alcohol), and improvement to his physique due to regular exercise (obesity increased the chances of attacks for his condition).
- lucb1e 7y agoI can't seem to read this article, it keeps redirecting to apnews://open?link_click_id=70xxx which of course gives an ERR_UNKNOWN_URL_SCHEME. Looking at the Wikipedia of Cyberbunker, I gather this is one of their bunkers, but not the main one in the Netherlands.
- x1ph0z 7y agoThe future is wild, criminal corporations running data centres... I wonder if anyone's hiring in Canada...
- kjs3 7y agoDrug cartels in Mexico & Central America have been found to be running heir own cellular phone networks. A rouge datacenter seems quaint in comparison.
- devicetray0 7y ago> “I think it’s a huge success ... that we were able at all to get police forces into the bunker complex, which is still secured at the highest military level,” Kunz said. “We had to overcome not only real, or analog, protections; we also cracked the digital protections of the data center.” This sentence is the punchline. I'm guessing they mean they were able to image the disks and capture memory while they were running unencrypted?
- wongarsu 7y agoI imagine the physical protections were not trivial to overcome either. In Germany you don't have to assist police as long as you don't actively obstruct them. If they come with a warrant you can't shut the door in their face, but you are not forced to open a closed door either. Normally not a big deal, after a few knocks the police breaks open the door. The government selling off bunkers with doors designed to withstand nuclear explosions throws a bit of a wrench in that concept.
- chrisMyzel 7y agoI grew up in that town (roughly 8000 ppl there) and would've never though someone there is capable of this.
- equalunique 7y agoIt's a long story, but I've been inside that Bunker while they were setting it up in 2015. The datacenter was still under construction. It was a magnificent thing to see, and quite a surprise to find in such a peaceful little town.
- chrisMyzel 7y agothats so funny, its sleepy af there at the mosel river, perfect in the end to do it. Very near to that bunker theres a (popular with dutch people) recreational site on top of Mont Royal - guess they were making holidays there first :) My mother told me Traben Trarbach is always selling properties out of money issues
- equalunique 7y agoIt's just down the road from the recreational site.
- aaron695 7y ago> Investigators say the platforms it hosted included “Cannabis Road,” a drug-dealing portal; the “Wall Street Market,” These are .onion sites closed months ago......
- equalunique 7y ago>The main suspect in the long-running investigation that led to raids on Thursday is a 59-year-old Dutchman who authorities believe acquired the former military bunker in Traben-Trarbach I'm shocked because I've been given a tour of this datacenter by the man's sons, whose mother is friends with my grandmother, and whom I have known since a very young age. Like, the mother, the sons, my mother, my grandmother, and me, all toured a 6-levels deep NATO bunker & the surrounding buildings. It was an amazing sight to see. They did not talk much about what they were doing there, only that it was meant to be a secure datacenter. Their mom was just so happy that the father and sons were finally working together on something lucrative, and that they had a place to live (the bunker & surrounding buildings had a lot of facilities). By the time of the tour, which was 2015, I hadn't seen them for several years. Catching up, I told them that I had a career a US federal gov contractor working in cyber security - to them, and I didn't realize it at the time, this was probably a red flag. I wanted to talk a lot about cyber sec stuff, but they seemed oddly quiet. Shortly after the visit, they went out of touch with my family. The final connection we had was one Facebook account belonging to the youngest kid - probably the 20yo one mentioned in the article. It seemed odd to me that he didn't use his real name, but now I understand why. It's been deleted. These kids had an interesting backstory. Their mother was a black woman from the Dutch colony Curaçao. She met the father sometime during or before the 90s. Their children were mixed race, and were never accepted by their grandparents, who allegedly were Nazi-affiliated. The prospect of marriage fell apart, and this single mother had to raise the two sons on her own. Living in Westervoort nearby Arnhem, she met and struck up a close friendship with my grandmother, who became kind of a surrogate grandmother for those kids. That NATO bunker is built upon a spot where Nazis would have used it during WWII. I thought it was an amazing turn of the tables for a black woman who was scorned by Nazis to now have a claim to it. I had pictures of the inside of that NATO bunker, which was amazing to see, but the iPhone they were stored on got stolen later that year. I wish I had them. If I'm lucky, some combing through DropBox might uncover a few.
- theonlyklas 7y ago>the iPhone they were stored on got stolen later thatbyear. I wonder if that's correlated to the fact that you took pictures inside that bunker ;)
- exabrial 7y ago“We had to overcome not only real, or analog, protections; we also cracked the digital protections of the data center.” This is a straight up movie script.
- ceejayoz 7y agoA few years back, they claimed to have withstood a SWAT raid. https://web.archive.org/web/20190427013216/https://cyberbunker.com/web/swat.php https://web.archive.org/web/20190427013216/https://cyberbunk...
- borumpilot 7y agoThat was in Holland, years ago. They too have been dismantled.
- mothsonasloth 7y agoThis related video by Norton is quite interesting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CashAq5RToM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CashAq5RToM
- unclesams-uncle 7y agoIt'd be hilarious if the EU hit them with GDPR violations, just to rub some salt in the wounds.
- tpmx 7y agoRelated: Gotta love the dutch data center mentality. :)
- hakunaubongo 7y agoGerman news site "Der Spiegel" with images: https://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/darknet-rechenzentrum-ermittler-beschlagnahmen-hunderte-server-a-1289056.html https://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/darknet-rechenzentrum-er...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- voldacar 7y agoThis is a real shame - among other things they had a great onion directory: https://web.archive.org/web/20190107132850/http://cb3rob.org/darknet/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190107132850/http://cb3rob.org...
- Havoc 7y agoWho on earth sets up a shop like that in Germany? Surely there are countries with more relaxed law enforcement. Not that I condone any of this. Just surprised
- pier25 7y agoSo how do you connect a data center to the internet without anyone noticing?