Hi, I'm Ryan Levy.

Welcome to Cyber reasons Malicious Life. On March 18, 2013, 2013, Stop House, a loose coalition of bulletproof hosting services and various dark web criminal

kinkpins, announced Operation Stop House.

The operations target was the Spam House Project, an international organization dedicated to protecting the public from email spam, web scams and similar threats.

The impetus for the operation was a Spamhouse's decision to add Cyberbunker, a bulletproof web hosting outfit

operating from a nuclear-era subterranean bunker in the Netherlands to its lists of spam sources.

These lists are used by numerous ISPs all over the world to block such spam before even reaching their customers.

Spam House has a well-deserved reputation for standing bravely against some of the most dangerous dregs of the internet back alleys.

But Cyberbunker was not your ordinary run-of-the-mill bulletproof hosting company either.

Most bulletproof hosters choose to establish their base of operation in countries where law enforcement

is lax, such as Russia or African countries, as far away from the long arm of Western law agencies as possible.

But not Cyberbunker.

Its founders Dutchman Hermann Johann Zent and Sven Ullaf Camphouse held deep anti-authoritarian views and in the mid-1990s decided

to test the resolve of the Dutch authorities to the limit by operating a

bulletproof web hosting data center outside of a peaceful Dutch town in the south of

the country inside an old NATO Cold War nuclear bunker.

Unfortunately for them, a fire that broke out inside the bunker drew the authorities attention to their operation and later decisions, such as their willingness to host the high profile but also hotly disputed Pirate Bay, BitTorrent Tracker, brought them even more to the public eye.

Ultimately, Spahouse decided to take action against the rogue hosting service, first cutting them off from their bandwidth providers

and then adding Cyberbunker rallied against Spam House.

The Stop House Coalition issued a public statement calling the Spam House Project an offshore

criminal network of tax circumventing self-declared internet terrorists pretending to be spam fighters and

demanding that Spam House seize its blacklisting activity and quote

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