PureVPN admits hackers got in, not the feds though

Customers of the virtual private network service received a falsified email purporting to come from the company’s founder, Uzair Gadit: "I’m sorry to inform you that due to an incident we had to close your account permanently. We are no longer able to run an anonymization service due to legal issues we are facing."

The message also warned, in infosecurity’s words, that “PureVPN had handed over full user details (presumably to the law enforcement agency causing the incident), and that it could not refund any money because its bank account had been frozen.”

On Oct. 6, Gadit refuted (in a blog) the bogus email: PureVPN is not closing, almost no user details had been compromised, it is continuing to operate, and the message was a hoax.

That said, there was a suspected breach. "Preliminary reports suggest that we are hit with a zero day exploit, found in WHMcs; 3rd party CRM that we use on our website," wrote Gaddit. However, he added, "we do not store any of our users credit card nor PayPal information in our on-site databases." Nor are user or usage logs stored on line. "We are able to confirm that the breach is limited to a subset of registered users Email IDs and names," he said.

Possessing merely certain customer names and email addresses, the culprits are only capable of blasting users with malicious messages. 

ThreatWatch is a regularly updated catalog of data breaches successfully striking every sector of the globe, as reported by journalists, researchers and the victims themselves.