Said Yen about the security of the platform, “if ProtonMail is ever breached in the future, only encrypted data would be accessible to the attackers.” And without the passphrase, he said, user data is useless. In addition to providing strong security, this helps assure the company cannot share user data with third parties, or scan user data to serve targeted advertisements. All data encryption and decryption happens on the client side, and data is secured using a passphrase which the company does not possess. ProtonMail uses end-to-end encryption to ensure that even the company itself does not have access to user messages. “Lives of reporters, dissidents, and whistleblowers depend on the reliability and security of encrypted email services like ProtonMail,” said Frederic Gargula, co-founder of IP Max, the Geneva-based internet service provider (ISP) that helped defend ProtonMail during the attack. Similar to Lavabit, the email provider Edward Snowden used to communicate with journalists, ProtonMail is used to send secure communication around the world. Born from work done at CERN, the research laboratory responsible for operating the particle-smashing Large Hadron Collider, ProtonMail’s mission is to develop and deploy end-to-end encrypted email and communication tools. ProtonMail is not merely a technology startup. ProtonMail servers were slammed with a 50 Gigabit per second wall of junk data that threatened to sink the company.
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The Switzerland-based secure email company ProtonMail was hit by one of Europe’s largest distributed denial of services (DDoS) attacks. Less than twelve hours later, on the morning of Wednesday, November 4th 2015, “things were out of control,” said Yen. “Usually these guys hit you a few times, then move on, so you just ignore them.” “We let users know we had been hit, called up the ISP, and then went back to sleep,” said ProtonMail CEO and CERN-alum Andy Yen. The ransom note arrived in the middle of the night, and it didn’t seem like a big deal. What started as a simple digital ransom quickly escalated into a trans-continental networking battle. Exclusive: Inside the ProtonMail siege: how two small companies fought off one of Europe’s largest DDoS attacks