• by Ray Schultz , March 1, 2019

VFEmail, an email security firm that recently suffered a catastrophic hack, has restored some functions, according to a timeline on the company’s website.

For example, it has located a backup server that was current as of August 2016. Mailboxes that existed at that time are now accessible.

In a tweet, the firm says: "We will not be shutting down. We’re not back to 100% capacity, and we’re still hoping browser data between 8/2016 and 2/2019 can be recovered."

"The US data center has been vacated, and we will run entirely from the NL datacenter."

In addition, the company has an "effectively untouched" utility server. This, it says, will "allow quicker restoration of back-end processes, such as Fetchmail."

And the firm said this week that its Contact Form has been rewritten, and that a new web server is in production. Cloudflare has been fully activated, it adds, advising clients, "flush your browser cookies & cache." Also, Challenge/Response has been fully restored.

However, it’s still not clear what this signals for the long-term business. 

The company announced last month that it had almost 20 years of email data destroyed by a hacker. There was no ransom, the firm said in a tweet—"just attack and destroy."

The firm "caught the perp in the middle of formatting the backup server," it said.

In addition, company founder Rick Romero tweeted: "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."

Since then, normal service copy has been restored to VFEmail’s home page.

In another February tweet, the service vendor writes: "While we haven’t pinpointed an attacker or ingress method, we’ve identified a number of security controls that need updating. This has been done in some cases, and in process in others."