Vanwege het coronavirus werken onze medewerkers thuis.
Two notorious websites, 8kun and the neo-Nazi news site Daily Stormer, remain connected to the rest of the web, the Dutch polder.
On June 6 of this year, Jim Watkins, an American businessman and online page administrator, 58, was summoned to testify before the United States Congress. It has to answer questions on its online page “8kun”, an Internet forum in which visitors can post messages anonymously. What role did this site play in the storming of the Capitol in early 2021?The audience is not easy, Watkins then complains in a live broadcast to his followers. “I questioned prosecutors for six hours,” he said.
Watkins’ website, 8kun, is the birthplace of QAnon, the unnamed figure amid an excessive conspiracy theory surrounding former US President Donald Trump. Trump, Q explains, has made covert attempts to purge the American “deep state” of secret agents. hired through a mysterious organization of other hard people like Soros, the Obamas, and the Clintons. It was only in 8kun that the genuine Q shared his messages. meaning of the “crumbs” of Q.
When thousands of Americans stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, it became clear how far the internet craze had spread to the real world. This symbolized by the notorious status of “Q-shaman” on Capitol Hill wearing a fur hat with buffalo horns. and a naked torso. ‘Q sent me’, a signal he was wearing.
Even before QAnon gained prominence, 8kun was already seen as the cesspool of the internet. The site, once called 8chan, is filled with hate speech, racism, far-right ideology and sometimes child pornography. In 2019, in a matter of months, 3 armed men posted their “manifesto” on the site before their terrorist attacks. The attacks on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, a synagogue in Poway, California, and a Latino shopping mall in El Paso, near the Mexican border, claimed 75 lives.
Only then was the limit of the major parts of the Internet reached. Publicly, they must no longer host or provide other facilities to the site, a rarity in web commerce. 8kun temporarily learned how difficult it was to stay online without their help.
Three years later, 8kun is still online: there are only a few routes left through which web traffic can be successful on the site. And one of them passes through a small village in the Dutch province of Flevoland.
On the other side of a car and dog wash called Pitstop, in a commercial domain on the outskirts of the small town of Dronten, 70 kilometers northeast of Amsterdam, is an installation by Dutch web company Serverius IT Infrastructure. Behind the modern construction with wood finishes, Serverius runs a knowledge center. The company also operates two others in Meppel and Apeldoorn in the eastern Netherlands. Just like a landlord subleases rooms, the company provides its web tenants with electricity, cooling, and internet for their virtual rooms. From those servers, stacked horizontally in racks to computer racks, Serverius clients run their own Internet services.
Tenants come from all over the world. The liberal and robust Netherlands, with its reliable energy grid and proper infrastructure, is an ideal location for knowledge centres and the hosting industry.
But the wisdom of those who rent the rooms is limited. Common practice in the industry is to show very little interest in what customers do or who they are, a limited sense of duty combined with complex cross-border sublease agreements. Monitoring is not the most sensible priority. Why threaten to turn away a bad visitor, who potentially generates tens of thousands of dollars a month, among the tens of thousands of smart consumers a data center can serve?
Whatever the reason, internet traffic similar to the notorious 8kun symbol array passes through Serverius’ knowledge center in Dronten, as studies by Ron Guilmette, an independent American internet scholar, have shown. First, it asks Internet corporations that transmit traffic to 8kun to avoid doing so: their ultimate goal is to make the site inaccessible from anywhere on the web. Says.
Analysis of the knowledge packets to 8kun shows that a company called VDSina is transmitting them. VDSina is a Russian company founded in Moscow and, according to its website, has “super epic servers” on Serverius in the Netherlands.
In addition to facilitating connectivity to 8kun, VDSina is well known to customers who perform DDOS attacks that remove Internet sites, spread computer viruses, and Internet sites related to credit cards, and identity theft. In the first quarter of this year, the influential Internet organization Spamhaus ranked VDSina No. 7 in its global ranking of botnet-busting bad hosts — networks of inflamed PCs used for malicious purposes. worst imaginable,” says Carel Bitter, a Dutch analyst at Spamhaus.
VDSina is not only helping to keep 8kun available in the Dutch data center, but also the Daily Stormer. The Daily Stormer is a notorious neo-Nazi news site.
It’s not a coincidence. They belong to the same VDSina client: Nick Lim, a young fundamentalist American Internet with absolutist perspectives on loose speech, who is 24 or 25 years old; His real age is unknown to the public. When 8kun largely pulled from the web after the 2019 terrorist attacks, administrator Watkins turned to Lim’s hosting company.
Lim had also hosted Daily Stormer after it was also spat through the primary facilities in 2017. The site is blatantly racist and anti-Semitic and advocates a momentary genocide of Jews. More recently, Kiwi Farms, a bullying site that organizes harassment of other transgender people, other lhbtqi people, and other people with autism, also failed at Lim’s web venture. At least 3 suicides have been linked to the brigadier at this site.
Lim confirms in terse emails that his company is indeed in Dutch knowledge centers and that it has a “strict commitment to freedom of expression and neutrality. “Beyond that, it is very little.
One of the few other Internet routes to those remaining Internet sites is through the Finnish company Oy Crea Nova, where Nick Lim personally bought a server. The Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat (HS), a newspaper with which NRC collaborated on this article, is investigating the company. According to an article published through HS on Saturday, the owner of Oy Crea Nova is under investigation for tax fraud. The owner was recently fined when the Finnish government discovered child pornography on one of his devices.
Who is to blame for those bad sites?When NRC starts making phone calls, all parties wave at each other and their customers. They claim they were unaware of hosting 8kun and other sites.
Gijs van Gemert, CEO of Serverius, said by phone that he does not know a visitor named VDSina. Van Gemert, however, knows a visitor known precisely by the same technical specifications, but by another name: “Hosting Technology Limited”. The company was once a direct visitor to Serverius, but now it’s a visitor to a visitor, Van Gemert says, you don’t need to know why. the host, your customer. He refers to MIRholding: VDSina is your visitor, he says.
It turns out that MIRholding belongs to a young Dutch-Russian pianist and Internet entrepreneur, Andrej Nesterenko. He has a post office box in a construction of a giant workplace in Amsterdam. Since last December, it has taken over VDSina as a server client, Nesterenko supports over the phone. . You assume that Hosting Technology Limited is a foreign entity of VDSina, created for tax purposes. The servers are still in Dronten, but his company gives more information that Serverius simply can’t provide. When NRC highlights its client’s reputation, Nesterenko says VDSina is a vital and reputable match. “They have a court case-based workplace open 24 hours a day,” he said. VDSina did not respond to questions from this newspaper.
An hour after the NRC contacted Serverius and MIR, 8kun and Daily Stormer fell worldwide. When asked about the interruption of a live broadcast, Jim Watkins begins to communicate about a plot through an American journalist and a former worker for the “catch and return” of whom he claims to have submitted a $20,000 bonus. Online news site Vice speculates that the sites are down due to DDOS attacks, caused by Kiwi Farms’ recent addition to Nick Lim’s customers.
Five hours after the first calls, 8kun and the Daily Stormer are back online, but the connection with Dronten has been severed. The Finnish road is also broken. Confronted with the HS newspaper, the owner of Oy Crea Nova temporarily disconnected the server. Nick Lim called angrily and asked for his cash, just over a thousand dollars. VDSina subsequently removed Serverius’ call and photo from its website.
The cat-and-mouse game continues for days, as Lim tries to find a new foothold for his sites. On several occasions, he was expelled from the parties after an investigation by the NRC. “Right now, Nick Lim is like a wounded momentum. “says Guilmette, a web researcher who monitors each and every move of websites. “It’s time to move temporarily to kill him, before he leaves again. “
8kun and Daily Stormer manage to repair their connections to the World Wide Web. Internet traffic to Nick Lim’s servers lately goes through an old acquaintance, a Dutch hosting company where until recently there was the largest amount of child pornography in the Netherlands: the company has, however, fired several problematic consumers in recent months.
Of all the places in the world that Nick Lim may have chosen to host those hated websites, he himself finds out where it all began: in the Netherlands. it’s called NForce Entertainment, a company from Roosendaal, Brabant.
In a telephone interview, Serverius director Gijs van Gemert said his company takes action if there is evidence of shaky content. For questions about VDSina, refer to MIRholding. ” it deserves to be transparent now that Serverius is not satisfied with such sites. “
Andrej Nesterenko of MIRholding writes that he rejects “any kind of child pornography, racist and terrorist content” but that his systems are “not foolproof. “He writes, “We regret it!” He claims he doesn’t know about VDSina’s reputation and would possibly not comment on the removal of 8chan and the Daily Stormer “for privacy reasons. “
NForce Entertainment has been streaming traffic on Nick Lim’s network since this week. Director Simon Shlomi Elimeleh says he will review it.
In a verbal exchange after the article was published, NForce director Simon Shlomi Elimereh said he pulled the plug on his consumer Nick Lim after NRC asked questions. He says NForce has a zero-tolerance policy regarding child sexual abuse material.