VFEmail almost loses 18 years’ worth of user data

E-mail provider VFEmail suffered a hack aimed at destroying user data, almost losing 18 years’ worth of customer e-mail. On 11 February,  VFEmail tweeted that all externally facing systems in multiple data centers were down. Later, the company revealed that an attacker formatted all disks on every server and that every VM, file server and backup server were lost. On 17 February the company unearthed an older backup server which was last backed up in August 2016. The next day, all mailboxes prior to August 2016 became available at nl101.vfemail.net port 1144. The company tweeted it will not shut down and that it hopes it can recover user data between June 2016 and February 2019. They also clarified that the US data center has been vacated and that the company will run entirely from the data center in Netherlands.