Police said they used Mailfence and ProtonMail, which provide secure and private email services -they have no ads, spams, trackers, solicitation or backdoor breaches, and are free of govt surveillance-and whose servers were based abroad. According to experts, ProtonMail provides a very high level of privacy. It promises more anonymity while retaining less data than Mailfence. Police found that the two had used a virtual private network, which protects users by encrypting data and masking IP addresses and makes it difficult to trace them.