Swiss email company
Protonmail has had its websites attacked despite paying hackers $6,000 not to do so. ProtonMail, a free encrypted email service, has headquarters in Geneva. The company offers end-to-end encrypted email with “zero access”, meaning its servers do not store user encryption keys. As a result, third parties cannot steal keys to decrypt its emails. The company paid the amount to put an end to Denial-of-Service (DOS) attacks that brought its sites offline. The move has brought criticism from many in the Internet community because it might encourage hackers to hold websites to ransom.
Earlier this week Protonmail’s blog suggested that the company had agreed to pay hackers a total of 15 bitcoins (which are valued at around $6,000). However, the payment did not halt the attacks and at the time of going to press the company’s website was still inaccessible.
ProtonMail has fallen victim to hackers that are thought to be responsible for a number of DDoS attacks in Switzerland. However, the exact identity of the hackers has yet to be determined. The company’s website received up to 100 gigabits per second of traffic which also brought down some of the company’s Zurich-based providers.
“We hoped that by paying, we could spare the other companies impacted by the attack against us, but the attacks continued nevertheless,” suggested the blog. “Attacks against infrastructure continued throughout the evening and in order to keep other customers online, our ISP was forced to stop announcing our IP range, effectively taking us offline. The attack disrupted traffic across the ISP’s entire network and got so serious that the criminals who extorted us previously even found it necessary to write us to deny responsibility for the second attack.”
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