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[Demeter]

25. Provocateur Comes Into View After Cyberattack

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/30/business/global/after-cyberattack-sven-olaf-kamphuis-is-at-heart-of-investigation.html

Sven Olaf Kamphuis calls himself the “minister of telecommunications and foreign affairs for the Republic of CyberBunker.” Others see him as the Prince of Spam. Mr. Kamphuis, who is actually Dutch, is at the heart of an international investigation into one of the biggest cyberattacks identified by authorities. He has not been charged with any crime and he denies direct involvement. But because of his outspoken position in a loose federation of hackers, authorities in the Netherlands and several other countries are examining what role he or the Internet companies he runs played in snarling traffic on the Web this week. He describes himself in his own Web postings as an Internet freedom fighter, along the lines of Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, with political views that range from eccentric to offensive. His likes: German heavy metal music, “Beavis and Butt-head” and the campaign to legalize medicinal marijuana. His dislikes: Jews, Luddites and authority.

Dutch computer security experts and former associates describe Mr. Kamphuis as a loner with brilliant programming skills. He did not respond to various requests for interviews, but he has communicated with the public through his Facebook page, which includes photos of himself, a thin, angular man with close-cropped hair and dark, bushy eyebrows, often wearing a hoodie sweatshirt.

“He’s like a loose cannon,” said Erik Bais, the owner of A2B-Internet, an Internet service provider that used to work with Mr. Kamphuis’s company, but severed ties two years ago. “He has no regard for repercussions or collateral damage.”

Mr. Kamphuis’s current nemesis is Spamhaus, a group based in Geneva that fights Internet spam by publishing blacklists of alleged offenders. Clients of Spamhaus use the information to block annoying e-mails offering discount Viagra or financial windfalls. But Mr. Kamphuis and other critics call Spamhaus a censor that judges what is or isn’t spam. Spamhaus acted, he wrote, “without any court verdict, just by blackmail of suppliers and Jew lies.” The spat that rocked the Internet escalated in mid-March when Spamhaus blacklisted two companies that Mr. Kamphuis runs, CB3ROB, an Internet service provider, and CyberBunker, a Web hosting service. Spamhaus contended that CyberBunker was a conduit for vast amounts of spam. CyberBunker says it accepts business from any site as long as it does not deal in “child porn nor anything related to terrorism.” Mr. Kamphuis responded by soliciting support for a hackers’ campaign to snarl Spamhaus’s Internet operations. “Yo anons, we could use a little help in shutting down illegal slander and blackmail censorship project ‘spamhaus.org,’ which thinks it can dictate its views on what should and should not be on the Internet,” he wrote on Facebook on March 23.

Mr. Kamphuis later disavowed any direct role in the so-called distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attack, which spilled over from Spamhaus to affect other sites. He took to Facebook to inform the world that the flood of Internet traffic that threatened to cripple parts of the Web emanated from Stophaus, an ad-hoc, amorphous group set up in January with the aim to thwart Spamhaus, a company it claims uses its “tiny business to attempt to control the Internet through underhanded extortion tactics.” Stophaus, which lists no contact or location for the group, claims to have members in the United States, Canada, Russia, Ukraine, China and Western Europe. Mr. Kamphuis said Stophaus was not a front for him; he is merely acting as a spokesman. Nonetheless, the authorities are curious. The Dutch national prosecutor’s office said on Thursday that it had opened an investigation. Wim de Bruin, a spokesman for the agency, which is based in Rotterdam, said prosecutors were first trying to determine whether the DDoS attacks had originated in the Netherlands. Authorities in Britain and several other European countries are also looking into the matter.

Mr. Kamphuis, who is believed to be about 35, is singled out because of his vocal role. “For the Dutch Internet community, it’s very clear that he has a big role in this, even if there isn’t 100 percent airtight proof that he is behind it,” said J. P. Velders, a security specialist at the University of Amsterdam. “He could not be not involved. How much is he involved — that is for law enforcement to figure out and to act upon.”

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