Important: Possible disturbances due to DDoS
Created at 22.October 2021, 18:15 | Category: Info
Dear Posteo customers,
We would like to inform you that yesterday and today we had to fend off DDoS attacks on a larger scale. For this reason, there have been network disruptions and delays and the availability was partly restricted yesterday morning and evening.
Also today in the afternoon the attacks continued. Although they are currently warded off effectively, we would like to inform you, just by way of precaution, that restrictions could occur again. We have already intensified our existing safeguards and continue to further diversify them.
During DDoS attacks internet services are overloaded with connection requests by criminals. Customers are then temporarily unable to access the service in question – or only in a very limited manner. Data is not attacked during DDoS attacks. With the help of technical measures these attacks can be contained and fended off. However, how fast this can be accomplished depends on the extent and type of the attack and also on the defensive measures that are taken.
We have received a threatening letter and a demand for money. We will not pay the amount of money demanded. Companies must not allow themselves to be blackmailed by criminals under any circumstances: Otherwise they will become even more attractive to them. And DDoS attacks often are not stopped even if money has been paid.
According to our security guidelines we have also informed the German Federal Office for Information Security (Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik).
As an email provider, we take our responsibility towards you very seriously. We therefore would like to give you a few tips.
In case Posteo should suddenly become slower or be temporarily unavailable within the next days, please proceed as follows:
- Do not be concerned. There are no technical disturbances on our part.
- Should you have problems accessing Posteo, please wait and then try again to open our website or retrieve your emails. You soon will be able to log in to your account as usual.
- Visit our Twitter profile @Posteo_en or our status page https://posteo-status.de to keep up to date. Should it indeed happen that our services are unavailable, we will inform about the situation there.
- Please do not send emails to our customer support if our service is unavailable for a short time. One of the attackers’ goals is it to push the companies that are being blackmailed to their capacity limits by generating masses of customer requests.
- Emails that are sent to you are not lost. When a disruption occurs emails are delivered as soon as our servers are available again.
Best regards
The Posteo team