German announced the closure of a data center in former NATO bunker
Recently, the German law enforcement agency in Berlin announced the closure of a data center installed in an abandoned bunker in NATO, which mainly supports illegal activities. This abandoned bunker is a previously constructed military defense facility of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, located on the banks of the Traben-Trarbach River in the western German town.
After a long period, this military bunker was finally abandoned by NATO. In 2013, Germany sold this scrapped military bunker to a Dutchman. Unexpectedly, the Dutch converted the military bunker into a large and expensive illegal data center, and there were multiple security measures to protect the data center.
When pursuing illegal websites selling drugs and cyber attacks, law enforcement agencies in Germany and partner countries accidentally discovered that the hosted data center was in a waste cover. These illegal websites are unable to use cloud services such as Amazon and Microsoft because public cloud providers will shut down the server directly after being found to be illegal. So how to provide long-term and stable service support is a big problem for these illegal website operators, and the Dutchman tries to provide solutions. The Dutch built military bunkers in accordance with data center standards and equipped with security defenses, and then provided server support to illegal websites. Thanks to stable operation, this data center has become a scent in the underground black market, and of course, it is expensive to host data. But after all, the data that needs to be hosted are criminals engaged in drugs, counterfeit money, and cyber attacks. Their illegal profits are so high that they don’t care about the cost.
In the long-term follow-up investigation, law enforcement agencies discovered that the data center hosted in the old bunker was running for a long time and served a number of well-known illegal websites. For example, illegal websites such as “Cannabis Road” and “Wall Street Market”, which have been smashed by law enforcement agencies, host websites and important data in the data center. To this end, German law enforcement agencies also made careful arrangements and carried heavy equipment to attack the old bunkers, because this old bunker still has a military-level defense. Eventually, the law enforcement agencies successfully broke through the data centers that entered the bunker.
Although some of the criminals who supported the operation of the data center were arrested, the Dutchman who was considered the founder had already moved to Singapore.
Source: apnews
