Slashdot Mirror
Domain: webhostingtalk.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to webhostingtalk.com.
Stories · 9
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Ex-Admin Deletes All Customer Data and Wipes Servers of Dutch Hosting Provider (bleepingcomputer.com)
An anonymous reader quotes BleepingComputer: Verelox, a provider of dedicated KVM and VPS servers based in The Hague, Netherlands, suffered a catastrophic outage after a former administrator deleted all customer data and wiped most of the company's servers. Details of what exactly happened aren't available, but according to posts on various web hosting forums [1, 2, 3], the incident appears to have taken place Thursday, when users couldn't access their servers or the company's website.
Verelox's homepage came back online earlier Friday, but the website was plastered with a grim message informing users of the ex-admin's actions. Following the incident, the hosting provider decided to take the rest of its network offline and focus on recovering customer data. Verelox staff don't believe they can recover all data.
Saturday night the web site was advising customers that the network and hosting services "will be back this week with security updates," adding that "current customers who are still interested in our services will receive compensation." -
Linode Hacked, Credit Cards and Passwords Leaked
An anonymous reader writes "On Friday Linode announced a precautionary password reset due to an attack despite claiming that they were not compromised. The attacker has claimed otherwise, claiming to have obtained card numbers and password hashes. Password hashes, source code fragments and directory listings have been released as proof. Linode has yet to comment on or deny these claims." -
ICANN Approves Internationalized Chinese Domain Names
philalethiac writes "Millions of Chinese language users will soon be able to access the Internet using Chinese script following a decision today by ICANN's Board of Directors to approve a set of Chinese language internationalized domain names." -
How To Prevent Being Hacked Via Backups?
Popsikle writes "A few days ago one of the Web's largest hosting discussion forums was supposedly hacked via their backup servers. From the story: 'We've since learned that this very deliberate, sophisticated and calculated hack against Web Hosting Talk was carried out by gaining access to our offsite backup servers. From our backup servers, the hacker gained access to the WHT db server. The malicious attacker deleted all backups from the backup servers within the infrastructure before deleting tables from our db server. We were alerted of the db exploitation and quickly shut down the site to prevent further damage.' What sort of security do you put on your backup infrastructure? Looking at your backup solution could you be completely taken down by either someone obtaining a backup or accessing your backup servers? What sort of recommendations does everyone have for this not to happen?" -
Datacenter Robbed for the Fourth Time in Two Years
mariushm writes "According to the Register, the Chicago-based colocation datacenter C I Host was attacked by armed intruders recently, making it the the fourth time in two years that armed thugs have made off with data. According to a letter C I Host officials sent customers, 'At least two masked intruders entered the suite after cutting into the reinforced walls with a power saw ... During the robbery, C I Host's night manager was repeatedly tazered and struck with a blunt instrument. After violently attacking the manager, the intruders stole equipment belonging to C I Host and its customers.' Aggravating the situation, C I Host representatives took several days to admit the most recent breach, according to several customers who said they lost equipment, all the while reporting the problems as 'router failures'." -
Jatol.com Disappears, Stranding Customers
J Cardella writes "On August 31, Jatol.com — a hosting company that had operated for five years, providing excellent support and reasonable prices — disappeared, leaving hundreds, if not thousands of people without access to their Web content and email. There is speculation that Jatol may have stopped paying their host, Fastservers. The evidence is that Fastservers has been turning off the machines with Jatol's customers' content. Jatol had already collected September hosting fees from their customers (including myself). The story gets stranger. The owner of Jatol.com, Tim Tooley, has also disappeared. He was apparently very ill for some time, and speculation on the thread goes from his skipping the country to lying dead in his home. Fastservers apparently is unwilling to turn the machines back on, so people could get their content, without authorization from Tooley." -
Identifying and Avoiding Dishonest Hosting Providers?
An anonymous reader asks: "Recently I have had the (dis)pleasure of dealing with the buyout and resulting problems problems of Managed.com by WebHostPlus, Alphared (aka Orangefiber) being dishonest about backup facilities (no power backups and not multi-homed), and CalPop overselling bandwidth. What can we do to protect us from these companies, they all seem to be have web sites and be real companies, but we seem to get scammed by them. The dishonest ones look a lot like the honest ones. We can't afford the attorney's fees or to build a data-center, and that is why we pay the monthly fee to host a server, but the companies do not have what they claim to, nor do they care about the customers. We contacted two attorneys in the United States and they said that the companies didn't have any assets worth going after. What does Slashdot think of these problems and what can we do to avoid them?" -
Hotmail Blocks Gmail Emails (and Invites)
bonhomme_de_neige writes "Emails and invitations sent to Hotmail from Gmail accounts do not bounce, but nor do they arrive in the recipient's Inbox - they vanish mysteriously into the aether. Joel Johnson writes in his Gizmodo weblog that invitations he sent to a Hotmail address bounced (this even received coverage from ZDNet). Search Engine Roundtable writes that several ISPs are blocking Gmail. It's already well-documented that Yahoo moves Gmail invites into the Bulk Mail folder. I've personally confirmed the Hotmail and Yahoo blocking." Please note: I've not been able to verify this one way or another. -
Best Weblogs for Personal Websites?
herrvinny asks: "What is the best weblog script to use on a personal web site? SourceForge and Google show plenty of weblogging systems available, but I just need a simple, powerful solution. Movable Type has been recommended to me, but I've heard of problems with spam, exploits, and comment flooding. I'd like to have a decently good comments section, where visitors can reply to my ramblings and have a fairly large toolset in which to do so, i.e. smilies, some limited HTML (bold, italic, etc). A small Polling plugin would be terrific as well. Which weblogging systems do Slashdot readers use and recommend? Some complexity isn't a problem; I can work in Perl, HTML, C (among other languages) if I need to. Also, what do people think of adapting Slashcode for such purposes?"