Encrypted email service ProtonMail was affected by the DDoS attacks

by do son · Published June 29, 2018 · Updated October 10, 2021

Encrypted email service ProtonMail has been attacked by DDoS in the past few days, due to frequent attacks and short-term offline. ProtonMail claims that it tracks attacks to an organisation allegedly associated with Russia. Now, the attackers have denied that they are Russian. The hacker organisation claims to be Apophis Squad. They are developing a DDoS attack service and randomly choose ProtonMail as the target to test the Beta version of their service.

They launched an SSDP flood attack on ProtonMail with the traffic of 200 Gbps. The first attack succeeded in getting ProtonMail off the line for 60 seconds.

The attackers claimed that they did not intend to interfere with ProtonMail’s services through the attack at first, but ProtonMail CTO Bart Butler’s remarks annoyed them. Bart Butler called the organisation a clown on Twitter.

Apophis Squad then increased its attack traffic and adopted more DDoS attacks with peak traffic reaching 500 Gbps.