a cable converter box connected to the internet. The attack was of a previously unreported scale (peaking at 300 Gbit/s; an average large-scale attack might reach 50 Gbit/s, and the largest previous publicly reported attack was 100 Gbit/s) was launched against Spamhaus's DNS servers; the effects of the attack had lasted for over a week. Steve Linford, chief executive for Spamhaus, said that they had withstood the attack, using the assistance of other internet companies such as Google to absorb the excess traffic. Linford also claimed that the attack was being investigated by five different national cyber-police-forces around the world, who had chosen to remain anonymous to avoid similar attacks on their own infrastructure. Spamhaus also hired Cloudflare, a DDoS mitigation company, to assist them by distributing their internet services across Cloudflare's worldwide network, after which the focus of the attack was redirected to the companies that provide Cloudflare's network connections. Spamhaus alleged that CyberBunker, in cooperation with "criminal gangs" from Eastern Europe and Russia, was behind the attack; CyberBunker did not respond to the BBC's request for comment on the allegation; however, Sven Olaf Kamphuis, the owner of CyberBunker, posted to his Facebook account on 23 March "Yo anons, we could use a little help in shutting down illegal slander and blackmail censorship project 'spamhaus.org,' which thinks it can dictate its views on what should and should not be on the Internet." According to The New York Times Kamphuis also claimed to be the spokesman of the attackers, and said in a message "We are aware that this is one of the largest DDoS attacks the world had publicly seen", and that CyberBunker was retaliating against Spamhaus for "abusing their influence". The NYT added that security researcher Dan Kaminsky said "You can’t stop a DNS flood ... The only way to deal with this problem is to find the people doing it and arrest them". The attack was attributed by network engineers to an anonymous group unhappy with Spamhaus, later identified by the victims of the attack as Stophaus, a loosely organized group of "bulletproof spam and malware hosters". On 26 April 2013, the owner of CyberBunker, Sven Olaf Kamphuis, was arrested in Spain for his part in the attack on Spamhaus. He was held in jail for 55 days pending extradition to the Netherlands, was released pending trial, and was ultimately found guilty and sentenced to 240 days