Why were dozens of emails containing false bomb threats linked to French airports sent from Switzerland? This is the question that arises, after the statements of the Minister of Transport. On October 22, Clément Beaune indicated that the same Swiss email address had been used for the vast majority of the messages in question, without providing further details. According to information from Tech&Co, the minister is actually referring to a tool well known to privacy advocates: Proton Mail.
Created in 2014, the Swiss company Proton specializes in services, free or paid, dedicated to the protection of privacy. Among the best known, Proton Mail, an email service available for free and that has an important feature: all exchanges are end-to-end encrypted. Therefore, its content is inaccessible to any third party, except the author and the recipient of an email. As with encrypted applications like WhatsApp, the content of the conversations is protected.
“Swiss neutrality”
“We do not have access to your messages, so we cannot transmit them to a government agency,” Proton says on its site, adding that its users’ data is “protected by Swiss laws, which are strict in terms of data protection.” “. privacy and for Swiss neutrality”.
Promises that could have attracted Internet users, potentially residing in France, who wanted to send false bomb threats, in the hope that their IP address would not be transmitted to the French authorities.
For Tech&Co, Proton assures that it only responds to requests from Swiss justice, and not to requests transmitted by foreign authorities. However, Switzerland has signed the Cybercrime Convention, which allows international cooperation of many countries, including those in the EU, in cases of cybercrime.
Therefore, as part of Proton Mail, the company remains blind to the content of the emails themselves. This limit, however, is not very relevant, since the authorities receiving the fake bomb alert email are aware of this content.
On the other hand, Proton has information that allows us to track these alerts, in particular thanks to the IP address, a series of numbers that allow us to identify the owner of a box.
“Your IP address may be permanently stored if you engage in activities that violate our terms and conditions,” Proton Mail also warns in its terms of use. In 2021, the company, through Swiss justice, allowed French police to identify climate activists accused of violence and damage.
To avoid this risk, some authors of false bomb threats have opted for the solution of VPNs, tools that allow them to go through an intermediary server to camouflage their IP address. But here too, the providers who offer these tools are also accustomed to retaining data that allows their clients to be identified in the event of illegal activity and to cooperating with the authorities.
Source: BFM TV
