The email service suffered a cyberattack that resulted in a massive data loss
VFEmail, the email service provider
specializing in users’ privacy, suffered a critical hack in recent days; according
to network
security and ethical hacking experts from the International Institute
of Cyber Security, all the information stored by the company has been destroyed,
including the backup servers and virtual machines.
In the words of the service owner, the
attackers left no ransom note, so there was no opportunity to negotiate a
payment. Due to this cyberattack
scope, it is speculated that VFEmail will close definitively. “Yes, VFEmail is
in fact offline. It probably won’t come back. I never thought anyone would mind
my work so much as to destroy it completely,” the owner posted on his Twitter
account (@Havokmon).
According to network security specialists, the
VFEmail started to think of the worst scenarios soon after the incident was detected:
“This doesn’t look good. All the external systems in different data centers
have collapsed”, the company mentioned via Twitter. VFEmail even managed to
detect hackers while formatting their backup servers.
A few hours later the service posted on Twitter
that the attackers could have managed to format all the disks on all their
servers, as well as eliminate their virtual machines. Although the VFEmail
virtual machines did not contain the same authentication as the servers, hackers
managed to compromise the entire infrastructure of VFEmail, destroying anything
in their path.
VFEmail administrators have launched some
security alerts for service users through its website. According to network
security specialists, VFEmail warns that “if users have their own email client
they should refrain from trying to reconnect it. Otherwise, all of the user’s
local mail will be lost.”
Although the email servers are one of the most
frequent victims of cyberattacks, this seems to be the first case in which the
attackers completely wipe victim’s information without even giving them the
opportunity to pay a ransom, in other cases of cyberattacks against email
services, hackers with access to large botnets demand a ransom to the companies.
The owner of the service eventually added, “I
don’t know the exact reason why this level of attack was executed against
VFEmail, although I do have some theories in mind. I have heard some rumors
about groups of hackers, political dissidents, activists and even traffickers
who used our platform; for many of these people it might be convenient for this
information to be lost,” the owner mentioned.
Finally, when questioned about the possibility
of putting the service online again, the owner commented: “For the moment I’m
aiming to not rehabilitate the service. There was a lot of custom code that had
to be rewritten; besides that VFEmail was never profitable, because we never
entered into practices such as selling personal information or publishing ads
directed to users”.
