“Catastrophic” hack on email provider destroys almost two decades of data

Enlarge / Toshiba MK1403MAV - broken glass platter (credit: Raimond Spekking)

Email provider VFEmail said it has suffered a catastrophic destruction of all of its servers by an unknown assailant who wiped out almost two decades' worth of data and backups in a matter of hours.

"Yes, @VFEmail is effectively gone," VFEmail founder Rick Romero wrote on Twitter Tuesday morning after watching someone methodically reformat hard drives of the service he started in 2001. "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."

Yes, @VFEmail is effectively gone. 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.

- Havokmon (@Havokmon) February 12, 2019

The ordeal started on Monday when he noticed all the servers for his service were down. A few hours later, VFEmail's Twitter account reported the attacker "just formatted everything." The account went on to report that VFEmail "caught the perp in the middle of formatting the backup server."

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