Bomb threat cited by Belarus was sent after plane was diverted – Swiss email provider
By Raphael Satter
May 27, 2021
WASHINGTON -A bomb threat cited by Belarusian authorities as the reason for forcing a Ryanair jetliner carrying a dissident journalist to land in Minsk was sent after the plane was diverted, privacy-focused email provider Proton Technologies AG said on Thursday.
The Belarusian authorities said they ordered the plane, which was in Belarusian airspace on its way from Greece to Lithuania, to land in the Belarusian capital on Sunday because of a bomb threat from the Islamist militant group Hamas.
Journalist Roman Protasevich and his girlfriend Sofia Sapega were arrested when the plane landed.
Hamas denied having any knowledge or connection to any bomb threat, and European leaders have accused Belarus of stat-sponsored piracy.
On Wednesday, the London-based research group Dossier Center published https://dossier.center/bel-hamas what it said was an email carrying the purported Hamas threat. The email was sent 24 minutes after the Belarusian authorities warned the plane’s crew there was a bomb threat, it showed.
ProtonMail, Israel, and Radware relationship
PDATE April 3, 2020: The information in this article is outdated. As of last year, we no longer have any contract with Radware.
ProtonMail is one of the only email providers which provides comprehensive DDoS protection. In order to provide this protection, we have partnered with Radware, one of the leaders in DDoS protection. Recently, malicious rumors have surfaced that our partnership with Radware means Israel has compromised ProtonMail email privacy (since Radware’s international headquarters is in Israel). These rumors have mostly been spread by conspiracy theorists who don’t at all understand ProtonMail’s technology.
These rumors are categorically false and stem from a fundamental misunderstanding of how ProtonMail’s DDoS protection works. ProtonMail protects against DDoS attacks by using BGP redirection and GRE tunnels. This means that Radware only handles incoming traffic, and all incoming traffic is encrypted. Both encryption layers (SSL and ProtonMail’s OpenPGPjs) are intact in this solution. That’s why we picked BGP redirection instead of more inexpensive DNS based DDoS protection systems like Cloudflare. In other words, Radware only sees encrypted packets and nothing else. Furthermore, we only send traffic to Radware when ProtonMail is under DDoS attack, during normal conditions, traffic is routed normally through Zurich and Radware doesn’t even see encrypted ProtonMail network traffic.
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