Users donate $50,000 to defend ProtonMail against attacks

Starting on Tuesday, November 3^rd, 2015, ProtonMail was hit with an extremely powerful DDOS attack. On November 4^th, the attackers began directly attacking the infrastructure of ProtonMail’s upstream providers and the datacenter itself. The coordinated assault on ProtonMail’s ISP exceeded 100Gbps and attacked not only the datacenter, but also routers in Zurich, Frankfurt, and other locations where the ISP has nodes. This coordinated assault on key infrastructure eventually managed to bring down both the datacenter and the ISP, which impacted hundreds of other companies, not just ProtonMail.

On Tuesday ProtonMail has published a new message about the attack on its blog.

In order to defend against future attacks of this scale, the start-up will need to utilize top-of-the-line solutions typically used by large companies such as Twitter, Facebook, etc. These solutions are very expensive and can run over $100,000 per year. Despite the cost, Protonmail has already begun to implement them, but this has placed an unexpected strain on the budget.

Four days ago, ProtonMail started a campaign on Gofundme.com to raise $50k for the new security solutions. The campaign is a huge success. More than 1500 people donated more than $50’000 in only three days. The campaign is still running.

In addition, ProtonMail took several measures to defend its service. The team has been working with the Swiss Governmental Computer Emergency Response Team (GovCERT), the Cybercrime Coordination Unit Switzerland (CYCO), as part of an ongoing criminal investigation being conducted here in Switzerland and with the assistance of Europol.