The spate of cyberattacks against email providers is likely to pass with time as they refuse to pay ransoms. But that doesn’t mean the attacks haven’t cost them.

Since early this month, the list of companies that have been attacked has grown longer: first ProtonMail of Switzerland, followed by HushMail, RunBox, VFEmail, Zoho and FastMail of Australia.

The companies have typically received extortion requests by email asking for 10 or 20 bitcoins in exchange for not being subjected to distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.

DDoS attacks involve sending a large amount of data traffic to a company’s network, causing the service to choke and go offline.

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