Pierluigi Paganini March 02, 2017

Dark net webmail provider For the third consecutive week, the popular Tor web email service SIGAINT is unavailable and the real cause is a mystery.

SIGAINT is one of the largest web email services on the TOR network that is used to send messages preserving the user’s anonymity.

For the third consecutive week, the popular email service is unavailable and the real cause is a mystery.

The service has run for years despite the attempt of law enforcement agencies of deanonymizing its users.

The SIGAINT (sigaintevyh2rzvw.onion) service is constantly under attack of Government agencies, in April 2015 its administrator warned the users of cyber attacks alleged launched by law enforcement agency who tried to hack the service.

In 2015, according to the Administrator, a persistent attacker with access to nearly 70 bad Tor exit nodes  (around 6 percent of the total) tried to compromise the email service.

One of the administrators of SIGAINT confirmed that his server was targeted by 58 malicious Tor exit nodes, but a member of the Tor Project, Philipp Winter, discovered other 12 bad exit nodes.

Back to the present, the email provider has been down since at least February 11, and there is no news about what’s happening to the service. Of course, rumors on the Internet are speculating on possible cause of the outage,

“Been happening for a few days actually. Possibly weeks if I didnt notice it. Wanted to check out my email on sigaint, the front abuse page as its named didnt load. So i loaded up wiki and tried out the .onion site and still didnt work.” wrote a Reddit user in a thread titled ‘Cant access sigaint ? ‘. “Tried another day and then another day and still nothing. Im not using bridges or anything, is this happening to more people? Thanks for answers. Wasnt sure where to post this so thought this would be a good place I hope.”

Anyway, even if the Sigaint service is still down, there are many other dark web email providers, below a short list published by freedomhacker.net.

• RuggedInbox – s4bysmmsnraf7eut.onion
• Torbox –torbox3uiot6wchz.onion
• Bitmessage – bitmailendavkbec.onion, clearweb
• Mail2Tor – mail2tor2zyjdctd.onion
• RiseUp – nzh3fv6jc6jskki3.onion, clearweb
• Lelantos – lelantoss7bcnwbv.onion paid accounts only
• Autistici – wi7qkxyrdpu5cmvr.onion, clearweb
• AnonInbox – ncikv3i4qfzwy2qy.onion paid accounts only
• VFEMail – 344c6kbnjnljjzlz.onion, clearweb

Just for curiosity, a Sigaint user is offering 20k to get back it emails.

“Hello friends, back again. Since my original post I have heard from a few others who are on board to put down money in order to get their emails back. I personally would be willing to chip in $10,000 for a download of all my emails from my accounts. Maybe more. There is no question I could get another $10,000 from a few friends who also would want their emails. Maybe more.” reads the user.

“Sigaint if you are reading this and plan to never return, please reach out. Stupidly enough, I pretty much stored my entire life on the Sigaint email. I had thought we would make 3 letter agencies cry forever 🙁

Do you want to stay anonymous as for some reason you cannot show face as Sigaint? Claim to be a hacker who stole the emails from Sigaint and we can use the mods of the hub, tmg, or a market as escrow.”

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Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs –  SIGAINT, Deep Web)