The story of CyberBunker, a hosting provider that once hosted The Pirate Bay and a number of dark web sites, whose German facility was raided by police in 2019
An eccentric Dutchman began living in a giant underground facility built by the German military—and ran a server farm beloved by cybercriminals. Tweets: @feikehacquebord , @balumcarnes , @alfonslopeztena , @newyorker , @newyorker , and @venkatananth Tweets: Feike Hacquebord / @feikehacquebord : A long, long read on the arrested owner of Cyberbunker near Traben-Trarbach. Worth your time when you are interested in bulletproof hosting, the darkweb and crypto phones. Lots of details that were unknown to me. https://www.newyorker.com/... Calum Barnes / @balumcarnes : This story about some weird Dutch nerd who buys nuclear bunkers to house dark web servers has all my favourite ingredients of Cold War hangover paranoia and conspiracy. All it lacks is a sprinkling of the occult. https://www.newyorker.com/... Alfons Lpez Tena / @alfonslopeztena : A Dutchman named Xennt, who lived underground in a vast nuclear bunker in Germany, with clever misfits— Dark web, server empire used by cybercriminals, encrypted phone network, 5-year police investigation, and an Irish crime boss: The Penguin By @edcaesar https://www.newyorker.com/... @newyorker : How a multinational investigation—and a 2019 sting involving some 650 officers—exposed a dark-web empire hosted in a giant ex-military bunker. https://nyer.cm/Devk9KJ @newyorker : .@edcaesar writes about the case of Herman-Johan Xennt, an eccentric Dutchman who purchased a massive, old German military bunker and set up a Web-server empire beloved by cybercriminals. https://www.newyorker.com/... Venkat Ananth / @venkatananth : This has to be a limited series/movie script. Quite bonkers. The CyberBunker story ft an eccentric Dutchman called Xennt. The story of a German Cold War bunker, once used by the West German Army, and later became home to a dark-web empire https://www.newyorker.com/... #longreads
Context & Ripple Effects
The New Yorker's long read arrives months after the event it reconstructs: a multinational sting of some 650 officers in which German police raided CyberBunker's facility near Traben-Trarbach — a Cold War-era military bunker repurposed by its eccentric Dutch owner Herman-Johan Xennt into a server farm — and arrested seven people.
The piece also lands mid-arc in a broader run of reporting on bulletproof hosting: the FBI's shutdown of Phantom Secure, whose privacy phones ended up serving the Sinaloa Cartel, NRC's finding that the Netherlands' Ecatel has faced little action despite years of investigation for hosting malware and child porn, and Bloomberg's profile of VanwaTech founder Nick Lim, who now hosts Daily Stormer and 8kun.
First-order effects
- Seven people, including owner Herman-Johan Xennt, were arrested and the bunker data center shuttered, instantly cutting off The Pirate Bay and the site's dark-web tenants from their host.
- German authorities demonstrated that a fortified underground facility offers no legal insulation: the raid was a multinational operation involving roughly 650 officers.
Second-order effects
- Displaced bulletproof-hosting demand migrates toward providers in jurisdictions that have been slower to act — Ecatel's Dutch data center, investigated for years without shutdown, illustrates where such tenants land when a rival falls.
- Adjacent criminal-infrastructure niches come under the same template: Phantom Secure's encrypted phones were dismantled by the FBI the same way, signaling that law enforcement treats hardware, hosting, and routing as one target set.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, enforcement against bulletproof hosting remains a cross-border whack-a-mole — each raid relocates demand rather than eliminating it, which is why successors like VanwaTech keep emerging in permissive jurisdictions.
- Hosting illicit content increasingly requires multinational police coordination rather than national action, pushing data-center regulation toward international information-sharing between prosecutors.
The trend: Bulletproof hosting is being dismantled provider-by-provider through multinational raids, with demand migrating each time to whichever jurisdiction has not yet acted.