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Comment by xSwag | Hacker News Reader

Funny story from the Hosting company[1]:

"Before the break of dawn on a morning in April, a full SWAT team was sent to execute a search warrant on CyberBunker's property."

"It must not have occurred to the officers that the blast doors were designed to withstand a 20 megaton nuclear explosion from close range. When the SWAT team realized that the door was not being opened for them, they throw flashbangs and take other actions to draw attention."

---

And from the NYT article:

“Dutch authorities and the police have made several attempts to enter the bunker by force,” the site said. “None of these attempts were successful.”

Haha, this is too funny.

More detailed article on NYT[2]

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[1]http://cyberbunker.com/web/swat.php

[2]http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/27/technology/internet/online...

View on HN

You stopped before the best part!

"On the other side of the blast doors, no one inside the bunker noticed anything unusual."

According to that story, nobody even realized that a SWAT team had tried to break their door down until hours later!

I looked up a video with an actual Dutch SWAT team and their uniform looks different. The one in the picture is pretty derpy, and they're carrying what looks like tiny medieval shields. I'm not convinced.

The picture is clearly Photoshopped. Light in the background is coming from the right, while light on the team is coming from the left.

Edit: talking about this picture: http://cyberbunker.com/web/images/swat-bunker.jpg

Edit2: I think it's more difficult to determine if it's real than I thought.

It's definitely photoshopped, look at the ground they're standing on, where it fades into the wooded area.

Is there a mirror of the image? Ironically enough, that server is down for the count.

There are trees all around.

Light could be coming from the top (around midday) and be blocked in arbitrary parts by the trees, so one part of the place gets light from the right, while another gets it from the left.

I don't think it's meant to be representative of their surveillance footage.

In the picture you see Riot Police, ‘Mobiele Eenheid’. A SWAT team is called ‘Arrestatieteam’ in Dutch http://www.svenvanbeek.nl/layout_imgs/632011/SVB_Arrestatiet...

I think they shopped the photo to illustrate their story -- they’re not claiming it’s genuine I imagine (after all, apparently it took place while they were asleep).

To HN user "stiller" who commented on my comment: it looks like you were hellbanned so none of your comments show up. You should probably get that fixed.

I think the uniforms in the picture are old, and the SWAT raid was supposedly many years ago, so it might be not be fake based on that.

they are uniforms of the Riot Police, not SWAT.

Nothing Sven Kamphuis says should be taken seriously. He's a raving lunatic and a fantasist with delusions of grandeur.

Everything he does however should be taken very seriously. He has the technical chops (old school hacker) and the means and criminal connections to back it up.

The comments on the NYT article you linked are interesting. The sheer amount of venom being directed at Cyberbunker. It's as if people cannot imagine that multiple parties might somehow be involved within that organization (hosting company).

Also, not everybody seems to love Spamhaus, which is largely overlooked in the articles.

Missing in this is who is attacking Spamhaus and why -- what is motivating the attackers to risk eventual detection or capture. Also, it seems implied but not stated, are all of the attacks originating from leased servers in Spamhaus???

I also enjoyed their "thumb my nose at the SWAT team" attitude.

However, realistically speaking it would be very, very simple to get their attention. With one shovel: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870463000457624...

I do not accept any of their claims at face value.

Is this the HN equivalent of "fake!" comments in YouTube videos?

You can read that they were "operating from a Cold War era government command bunker that was purpose-built by the military to house sensitive electronic gear".

This makes the story about the SWAT team very believable.

That makes the story possible. Believable is a different realm entirely.

When I read the story I also thought it was most likely BS.

They claim that the SWAT team just gave up and went back to their police station and then denied they ever went there. If a SWAT team were executing a search warrant or seeking to arrest people, they would not just decide to drop the case because they couldn't get in.

They also claim to have extensive video of this event but decided not to release any of it because the police gave them 8,000 Euros to repair their fence. That video would be worth orders of magnitude more for PR purposes if they released it.

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...

Note that "close range" in this case is a 20Mt explosion 5km away:

http://cyberbunker.com/web/bunker-specs.php

Having said that, in the case of 20Mt nukes I suspect 5km does count as "close range".

According to a convenient nuclear effects calculator I found[1], 20MT at 5km and an optimal burst height will generate over 40psi of overpressure. The fireball itself will reach about 4km in radius. According to another site[2], 20psi is enough to severely damage or destroy heavily built concrete buildings, and the maximum wind speed at 40psi will be greater than the speed of sound. For comparison, 3psi is enough to destroy a normal house.

So, yeah, 5km counts as "close range".

[1] http://www.fourmilab.ch/cgi-bin/Bombcalc?yield=20&yunit=...

[2] http://www.atomicarchive.com/Effects/effects4.shtml

Indeed; if you really want to survive such effects, you need to do what they did in Cheyenne Mountain: build a tunnel through a mountain and install your blast doors etc. perpendicular to it some distance from the entrances; Wikipedia says it'll handle 600 psi. One of the reasons we deemphasized it and went to Boeing E-4s (747 command posts) in the early '70s was that we judged the Soviets had a good chance of landing serious warheads at both ends of the tunnel at the same time, which would exceed its design limits.

The SS-18 Mod 3 was introduced in 1976 - 20Mt warhead with a CEP of 700m - the Mod 5 reduced that to 370m.

Not even a large mountain is going to withstand multiple 20Mt hits.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-36_%28missile%29

Tom Clancey described these missiles as having the mission to: "turn Cheyenne Mountain into Cheyenne Lake."

The novel "Arc Light" also has a description (probably not that accurate) of a limited strike by Russia against the US that includes destruction of the bunkers at Cheyenne Mountain, Raven Rock Mountain and Omaha:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_Light_%28novel%29

Probably not that accurate indeed: several Amazon reviewers noted his descriptions of "vicious" recoil from M16 rifles (!!!). If he got something so widely, if not infamously, well known so wrong, why would we expect anything else to be correct?

On the other hand, an early strike at both ends of the tunnel is very different from eroding it over some period of time (has to be some separation to avoid fratricide); if the construction was done well enough, the latter might have provided more time for NORAD to transmit additional data about the attack in progress.

Glad to know in the case of full scale nuclear war, the only survivors will be lunatics and data center admins.

They are not disjoint sets.

http://xkcd.com/705/

relevant fiction:

http://craphound.com/overclocked/Cory_Doctorow_-_Overclocked...

See the short story 'When Sysdmins Ruled the Earth' by Cory Doctorow.

(http://craphound.com/overclocked/Cory_Doctorow_-_Overclocked...)

Sounds like the beginning of a series!

I'd watch it.

You could call it 'When sysadmins ruled the world'.

Then you could have Cory Doctorow write it.

I tried to tweet that link. But I guess SpamHaus's blacklist really works. Twitter gave me this error:

Oops! A URL in your Tweet appears to link to a page that has spammy or unsafe content. Learn more

If you wash it through bit.ly, it's fine: http://bit.ly/Xc4RQc

Haha, wow. I can see why they're mad.

I can't even load the webpage -- no warning, just a could not connect.

If this is caused by spamhause then I support the other guys. Censorship is worse than spam.

I don't think that's caused by Spamhaus. Possibly fallout of the attack? I'm having no problems connecting, although the page doesn't want to finish loading.

Spamhaus identifies spammers. They don't take down websites or block connections.

Its most certainly fake. That is dutch riot police. We don't have SWAT teams but "arrest teams". They definitely don't wear white helmets. They definitely don't just trow around flash bangs. And the kicker, knowing dutch police bureaucracy, they did not get a refund this quick.

Wouldn't it be easier to just take a backhoe to the data lines running to the bunker?

Wouldn't it just be easier to, I dunno, unplug something? Or turn something off? Why would you fuck up the lines...

You can't "turn off" that bunker, it has multiple diesel generators and lots of fuel reserves. It also has clean water reserves and air filtering capabilities, so you can't gas the people inside.

Physically cutting its uplink lines would be IMHO the most efficient way to neutralize that datacenter.

There is, of course, the other end of the cable connecting to the rest of the world... no need to actually cut the cable. You could do it with software alone really.

Or just getting all their peering exchanges to null route packets in and out. Advantage being that it's cheaper, more effective and less lawsuit prone.

This would be more believable if they'd posted the surveillance video.

However, their weakness is that they do only have a limited supply of Fritos and Dr. Pepper inside said bunker.

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