All US data from email provider VFEmail was destroyed by an unknown hacker, deleting nearly two decades' worth of emails, VFEmail said Tuesday. The email provider, which was founded in 2001, scans each email for viruses and spam before they get to someone's inbox. If a virus is found, it's blocked from getting onto VFEmail's servers. "Yes, @VFEmail is effectively gone," VFEmail owner Rick Romero said on Twitter. "It will likely not return. I never thought anyone would care about my labor of love so much that they'd want to completely and thoroughly destroy it." VFEmail began noticing the issue on Monday, tweeting that "All externally facing systems ... in multiple data centers are down." In a following tweet, VFEmail said it had caught a hacker who was in the middle of formatting the backup server. The email provider then tweeted that all US-based data may be lost. An hour later, VFEmail said the attacker had formatted the disks on every server. "Every file server is lost, every backup server is lost," the provider wrote. "We have suffered catastrophic destruction at the hands of a hacker," VFEmail wrote on its site. "This person has destroyed all data in the US, both primary and backup systems. We are working to recover what data we can." The hacker's motivation isn't clear. VFEmail said in a tweet that there was no ransom. "Just attack and destroy." Some VFEmail users who didn't want their email stored in the US had it stored on servers in the Netherlands, but that data was also destroyed, Romero told CNET. Fortunately, the provider's backup there was intact, so data in the Netherlands was restored, though "It's nowhere near a full restore," he said. First published Feb. 12, 3:23 p.m. PT.Update, 4:42 p.m.: Adds comment from Romero.
A cyber attack has destroyed 2001 worth of US-based data from email provider VFEmail. The company confirmed that an unknown hacker had formatted the disks on every server and back-up server, erasing all the files held since the provider's inception in almost 20 years'. VFEmail described the incident as causing "catastrophic destruction", effectively ending the firm's operations for good. Fortunately, some users had requested that their data not be stored in the US, so was kept on servers in the Netherlands where back-up servers were unaffected. The motivation behind the attack remains unknown as no ransom was requested.