The Dutchman responsible for almost breaking the Internet back in 2013 is going on trial this week.
However, 39-year-old Sven Olaf Kamphuis is denouncing the case against him and refusing to show up in court. Instead, he will be represented by his lawyers in the southern Dutch city of Dordrecht.
Kamphuis is accused of being the mastermind behind a massive distribution denial of service (DDoS) attack against Geneva and London-based volunteer group Spamhaus, which publishes spam blacklists used by networks to filter out unwanted emails. The organization blames Dutch web-hosting service Cyberbunker for the attack.
Kamphuis was the spokesman for Cyberbunker at the time of the breech.
The cyber attack and its subsequent domino effect was described by the Dutch daily tabloid Algemeen Dagblad to The Guardian as being “so big that the world came within a hair’s breadth of being without the Internet for a week.”
The DDoS assaulted multiple websites with traffic from various sources in order to disrupt and/or seize servers. Experts said the DDoS flooded Spamhaus with 300 gigabytes per seconds of data, an unprecedented number compared to previous DDoS attacks measured at 50 gigabytes per second.
This breach impacted nearly every connected Internet user worldwide. Considering the fact that global mobile traffic accounts for 10% of all Internet traffic, a simple crack in the Internet can potentially disrupt thousands in a split second.
Shortly after, Kamphuis was arrested in Spain and extradited to the Netherlands, where he was remanded for two months.
In response to the response, Cyberbunker said it had been unfairly labeled as a haven for cyber crime and spam.
According to Kamphuis’s lawyer, he no longer lives in the Netherlands and is staying in either Berlin or Barcelona. Kamphuis has also counter-suing the Dutch state for $111 million in damages.