ProtonMail Pays Bitcoin Ransom to Stop DDoS Attack
ProtonMail, an open-sourced encrypted mail service founded by MIT and Stanford engineers at the CERN research facility, has suffered from a series of extremely powerful DDoS attack from unknown hackers, which took ProtonMail offline for almost 24 hours. Over the past three days, the ProtonMail team has been working with the Swiss Governmental Computer Emergency Response Team (GovCERT) and the Cybercrime Coordination Unit Switzerland (CYCO) in a criminal investigation to analyze the cyberattack and the blackmails sent after the first DDoS attack on November 3. “Slightly before midnight on....
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Encrypted email service provider ProtonMail recently and grudgingly gave in to a ransom demand of 15 bitcoin (approx $6000) to attackers who targeted the service with destructive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. ProtonMail, an encrypted email service set up by CERN scientists in Geneva and researchers at MIT, has revealed crippling DDoS attacks to be the cause of a recent outage suffered by the crypto e-mail service provider. Two groups are believed to be behind the attacks, one of which began the cyber-strikes and put forth the ransom demand. The website remains down at the....
Secure mail service provider ProtonMail has again come under renewed DDoS attack and the email service has gone offline inconveniencing its users. This is yet another high-profile case involving Bitcoin ransom which has come to light! The mail service was created to ensure the safety and privacy of the users but in a rather unusual event it is now facing an unprecedented challenge as it came under sustained and aggressive DDoS attacks which began on November 3rd, 2015. In a statement titled DDoS Update it even requested experts to help in the following words: "If you or someone you know....
A cyber criminal claiming to be from Armada Collective has sent a ransom email asking website owners to either send him 1 BTC in ransom or face high-speed DDoS attack tomorrow... Armada Collective, a mysterious group of cybercriminals seem to be back again! The group known to disrupt websites by launching Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks may have sent emails demanding Bitcoin ransom from website owners. According to reports, many internet users have received an email demanding a ransom of 1 BTC. The sender, claiming to be from Armada Collective has threatened to launch a 10-300....
A number of privacy-oriented email service providers have been targeted by distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) extortionists demanding payment in bitcoin. Hushmail, ProtonMail and Runbox, among other services, were targeted by an entity calling itself the Armada Collective. The group was the subject of a warning from earlier this fall by the Swiss Governmental Computer Emergency Response Team, a national agency dedicated to cybersecurity issues. Blog posts from the email providers indicate that the attacks took place between 3rd and 6th November. In the case of ProtonMail, the service....
The attack comes just one week after a U.K. court ordered the website to stop hosting the Bitcoin white paper. A website aiming to support the development of Bitcoin has reportedly been hit with a DDoS attack.Cøbra, the pseudonymous owner of Bitcoin.org, reported on Twitter today that the website had been hit with an “absolutely massive” distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attack along with a ransom demand for an undisclosed amount of Bitcoin (BTC). At time of publication, Bitcoin.org is still accessible. “Back in the day you could put up a reasonable fight against most DDoS attacks,”....