A look at a data center in the Netherlands run by Ecatel, which has faced little action despite being investigated for years for hosting malware and child porn
Hosting In the village of Wormer, there is a data centre run by two men from The Hague. For years they have been under investigation … Tweets: @fborgesius Tweets: Frederik Zuiderveen Borgesius / @fborgesius : NL: “there is a data centre run by two men from The Hague. For years they have been under investigation by the authorities in connection with cybercrime, malware and child pornography on their network. But that has not deterred the two men” https://www.nrc.nl/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The NRC profile lands amid a string of European crackdowns on abusive hosting: German police raided and shut the CyberBunker facility in 2019, and Dutch police have moved against criminal online services themselves, from the Anon-IB revenge porn site to the Sky ECC messaging network infiltrated earlier this year.
Against that record, Ecatel stands out as the counter-case: a data centre in Wormer, run by two men from The Hague, that authorities have investigated for years over cybercrime, malware and child pornography on its network — without the kind of decisive action seen elsewhere.
First-order effects
- Ecatel's operators keep doing business as usual: the years-long investigation has produced no shutdown, arrest or service disruption reported for the Wormer facility.
- The report puts renewed public attention on Dutch prosecutors and police, who now face an obvious gap between their cross-border successes and their inaction on a domestic case.
Second-order effects
- The contrast with Germany's bunker raid hands Dutch authorities a template and a reputational incentive: physical closure of the facility itself, not just investigation of its contents, becomes the expected response.
- Legitimate Dutch hosting providers and data-centre operators absorb the reputational cost, as the country's image as a permissive corner of European hosting gets another high-profile data point.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, criminal hosting migrates toward jurisdictions where enforcement lags — the Ecatel case shows that even well-documented abuse inside the EU can persist when local authorities don't act.
- Enforcement is converging on infrastructure-level takedowns — seizing facilities and networks rather than individual sites — raising the question of what legal threshold triggers that step domestically versus abroad.
The trend: European law enforcement is shifting from investigating abusive hosters to physically dismantling them — but Ecatel shows the pace still depends entirely on which jurisdiction the servers sit in.