“The Netflix documentary "Cyberbunker: The Criminal Underworld" was released in 2023. It contains interviews with the investigating prosecutor and police officers, journalists, the mayor of Traben-Trarbach, Xennt and other members of his organization. Police revealed that they had planted an undercover gardener and a cleaning lady in the bunker and that they lured Xennt and his crew out of the bunker before the raid.” CyberBunker - Wikipedia
Bunker location: 49.968234212603065, 7.120014179559591 See - NATO Bunker Traben-Trarbach - Google Maps
Watch the documentary here: Netflix
Some lines just stay with you. 'You wouldn't want your sister to marry one', for example. That's from Harry Harrison's 1965 masterpiece 'Bill The Galactic Hero'. It's what came to mind as I watched the collective of cybercreeps that make up the cast of Netflix's Cyberbunker; The Criminal Underworld. The whole set-up is the stuff of teenage dreams. A bunker filled with computers and banks of screens. It’s Batman's cave meets Neo's bedsit. At first I thought we were dealing with a story from the early noughties. But nope, it's 2013. A good twenty years or more after The Matrix.
Everything about this lot made be shudder. In part because I know the types. These guys aren't rarities. They are just exceptionally extreme in their silliness, and in the case of the one called Xennt, in his criminal tendencies and stratospheric arrogance. Some of the arguments presented by this bunch make me wonder at what point in their adolescence their intellectual growth came to a complete standstill.
There is, unfortunately, a widespread tendency to buy into the myth about hackers, hackivists, digital-anarchists, and so on. In part, this is because there's still a degree of misunderstanding around the skills required to break into a website or a server. Or even to break a software system. And there is a general lack of knowledge about how the internet works. No one holds the hackers and cyber-vandals in higher regard than themselves.
In time, this mythology will crumble, as more kids opt to become programmers and as schools incorporate solid IT skills into their curricula. There's really nothing admirable about being an online vandal, or in hacking into a website, slowing down the internet, infecting your files with a silly virus, rendering them unopenable, etc. This is just the IT equivalent to, say, damaging electricity wires, or a road surface. Low-grade criminal activity with far-reaching consequences.
Hosting websites that conduct obvious criminal activity (from the spreading of pedo-porn to the selling of dangerous narcotics) might seem like good wholesome fun if you live in a bunker and survive on junk food and weed. For most of us, it's pretty obviously the type of thing that deserves a spell in a similarly heavily locked-down environment. Just with a few tweaks - uniformed guards, regulated mealtimes, and strict lights-out times.
Fun Stats…
8: number of convictions
250,000: sever transactions (mostly for drugs) on CyberBunker servers
275: pages in the indictment against CyberBunker employees
650: police officers involved in the raid on the bunker in Traben Traben
5 floors (4 underground), 5,500 square meters, 32 acres of land: size of the bunker
1000: the number of new bunkers being built by NATO members or allies today
10,000+++: the number of abandoned NATO bunkers in Europe
GS