Cybercriminals jeopardize VFEmail’s operations after deleting their data

• In the attack, data pertaining to US users of VFEMail was deleted in all of its servers.
• As a consequence, the email provider has hinted that it is unlikely to resume operations.

VFEmail, an email service provider offering free and paid services since 2001, has been struck with a devastating blow by a cyberattack. Unknown cyber attackers have entirely wiped out their servers of data related to the email provider’s US users.

The incident came to light yesterday when VFEmail’s site and web client faced an outage for a while. It appears that the attackers have even destroyed the backup servers used by the company.

Almost all VMs lost

The email provider elaborated on the developments in a series of tweets. “At this time, the attacker has formatted all the disks on every server. Every VM is lost. Every file server is lost, every backup server is lost. NL was 100% hosted with a vastly smaller dataset. NL backups by the provider were intact, and service should be up there,” read one tweet.

“Strangely, not all VMs shared the same authentication, but all were destroyed. This was more than a multi-password via ssh exploit, and there was no ransom. Just attack and destroy,” described another tweet indicating that the hack was not intended for extortion.

Fortunately, VFEmail has told that its employees are working to recover a server which was caught during an attempted ‘formatting’ by the attackers. The company might provide an update regarding this in the coming days. Moreover, VFEmail’s subdomains have also been offline post the hack.

In their website, the company has notified users of its free email service to stay away from sending emails. This is due to the delivery mechanism being disabled for now. However, paid users can use the service.