Hacker Attacks

Dave Green

On February 21, 2010 our services were compromised by a hacker from afar. This is a very rare occurrence that was responded to with a high degree of professionalism by our hosting partner iPlan and our technical support partner Xenial Technology. In the nearly ten years since we began offering our own hosting we have been attacked dozens of times. On 3 occasions the hacker was able to penetrate our server defenses and post pages, as happened on this occassion, or upload a Trojan horse that effected a few databases. In only 4 cases over ten years have we had an attack that totally brought down any sites. This track record is very good compared to the industry as a whole and we continue to provide 99.9% uptime for all of our clients.

This latest attack has been analyzed by the team and we discovered some things we needed to change:

• Limit anonymous access via FTP and other file upload programs.
• Tighten permissions for all hosted databases
• Tighten permissions for all directories used by web-based applications
• Improve site monitoring processes

These precautions will in no way affect your use of the services provided. And, despite the hacker community's best efforts, we have been able to better anticipate where they can or will strike as a result of this last attack.

What You Can Do To Help

Logging Out - These are simple procedures we all must follow. Most of you have noticed you are sometimes logged out of WebAdmin or RocketCart automatically and have to sign back in. This is a procedure that helps limit one way a hacker can gain access to your website. More and more often, people are using cafe wireless services. Most of these types of Wi-Fi access services are not secure. A Wi-Fi hotspot that is not secure is vulnerable to hackers who have tools that allow them to watch what you are doing online. That is one reason you can help all of us by logging out after you work on WebAdmin or RocketCart. And you should make that a practice even if you are on a secure network.

Virus Protection - More and more we are all subject to threats on our local or personal computers. By making certain your anti-virus applications are up to date you protect your own computers and data while limiting one way a hacker can penetrate an online service. New hacker techniques include downloading a Trojan horse to your local computer that sites and waits for you to open up an internet connection. Then they go to work trying to upload their "package" to the server you've connected to. While we try to prevent this type of attack on the servers by continuously updating our virus scan tools, there are opportunities for something to get uploaded unintentionally.

Thanks again to all our great clients for your support and help in making the web safer for all of us.

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us at support@readywebgo.com.