DDoS Attacks – Summary of Events

November 10, 2015 16 Comments

Between November 4-6, Runbox experienced powerful DDoS attacks by a group calling themselves “Armada Collective”. Other security oriented email services such as ProtonMail, Hushmail, and Neomailbox were also attacked, as recently reported by Forbes.

The initial threats and attacks that attempted to extort money were withdrawn by the attackers on Saturday morning, when they offered an apology.

During the attacks we were focused on coordinating with our partners, putting in place countermeasures, and providing our customers with necessary information. Since the situation was unclear and evolved quickly, we decided to not publish any details that could inform the attackers in any way.

The situation is now under control and we are publishing this summary of the events as it may help shed light on what transpired against both Runbox and the other services that were attacked.

(more…)

Continue Reading →

DDoS Attacks on Runbox

November 5, 2015 11 Comments

Yesterday and today Runbox was subject to Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. This was initiated by a group that have threatened that if Runbox does not pay them a large amount of money, further attacks will take place in the coming days.

We were able to successfully mitigate against the effects of both incidents. During the initial attack we were down for around 15 minutes before we could put a solution in place. Today our customers should not have noticed any effects of the attack.

We think the attacks might be scaled up in the coming days.

(more…)

Continue Reading →

Scheduled maintenance Oct 12, 2015

October 8, 2015 1 Comment

On Monday, October 12 at 0600 CEST we will replace an email storage unit, and our email services will unfortunately not be accessible while we switch servers.

The downtime will start at approximately 0600 CEST (0400 GMT,  0000 EDT) and last for 30-45 minutes.

Runbox will accept incoming email to your account during the downtime, and those messages will be delivered when the operation is complete. It will however not be possible to send email.

We apologize for any inconvenience caused, and recommend that you check your email before or after the scheduled maintenance window.

To find the local time where you are for this maintenance, please see the time conversion at timeanddate.com

Continue Reading →

SPF Record Change

October 1, 2015 8 Comments

After careful consideration we have decided to adopt a stricter policy with regards to SPF (Sender Policy Framework) records for our own Runbox domains.

Note: This does not affect domains owned by our customers.

What are SPF records?

SPF records are used as a way to determine if email addresses are being spoofed in sent mail. They allow domain administrators (Runbox in this case) to specify which servers are allowed to send email for the domains they control.

(more…)

Continue Reading →

Phishing message alert 2015.09.02

September 2, 2015 Leave a comment

If you receive messages with the subject “ATTN: RUNBOX ACCOUNT USER” that appears to have been sent from “RUNBOX HELPDESK“, please delete them.

We are deleting all the instances of these messages we can find on the Runbox servers, but we might miss some.

These messages are not sent from Runbox staff and are an attempt to trick Runbox customers into entering their login information at malicious websites.

For more information about phishing, please see the Phishing section of this article.

Continue Reading →

Runbox is running faster

August 29, 2015 6 Comments

After doing some tuning to our central database yesterday we have been able to increase the speed of all our email services significantly.

This is especially noticeable when using the Webmail, but email clients using IMAP and POP should also be faster.

This was made possible because Runbox is a database accelerated email system, where all basic message data is stored in a central database. This means that our various services don’t have to open any actual files on the storage units to display folder contents. Only when a message is opened do the services access the message files themselves.

We’d be interested in hearing if Runbox is running faster for you. Meanwhile we’ll continue working to improve the performance of our services!

Continue Reading →

New IMAP Server Software

August 26, 2015 4 Comments

We are pleased to announce the official launch of our new IMAP server software.

We’ve been extensively testing and improving the new Dovecot-based software in an open beta phase for several months. We are now very happy with how it’s performing, and it resolves several issues with our current IMAP software (see below).

We will therefore be moving to the new software and will retire our existing Courier-based IMAP servers. Since the new software uses a more standardized configuration, all IMAP users will need to change their settings by December 1, 2015.

Note: If you have already changed your email client’s settings as part of the open beta phase you don’t need to do anything.

(more…)

Continue Reading →