Proton email is under attack
In addition to the MH17 and Skripal stories, Bellingcat has outed members of Russia’s GRU intelligence agency that are active in other countries. The Bellingcat reporters were the ones who broke key details of each of these stories, such as the names of the Russian operatives believed to be behind the MH17 attack and the Skripal poisoning. ProtonMail has measures in place to automatically detect and filter these sorts of attacks, but chief executive Andy Yen revealed that the hackers exploited a vulnerability in a third-party system that was not previously known to the public.īellingcat confirmed that the attacks were focused on several researchers working on stories covering the downing of flight MH17 and the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal on UK soil. The email also contained links to a fake ProtonMail site registered by the attackers that attempted to deliver some sort of malware via JavaScript. The phishing attack was somewhat sophisticated in that it made use of a spoofed return address that made it appear to be coming from a legitimate ProtonMail staff account. The notice claimed that encryption keys had been compromised and would need to be replaced. That was the case here, as in late July the journalists in question received a false breach notice purporting to be from the ProtonMail team. Given that ProtonMail was designed to be the ultimate in privacy and security, hackers generally look to phish individual users rather than attack the system.
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Based in Switzerland, the service is outside the jurisdiction of the EU and is popular with journalists working on sensitive stories and communicating with anonymous sources.
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ProtonMail is a unique web-based email service that offers strong standard end-to-end encryption and has a basic tier that is free.