100,000 Web Sites Lost
The news that a the UK hosting company VAServ lost 100,000 web sites all at once is devastating for the organisations involved. It appears that many cannot be recovered and a considerable number do not have recent backups.
From the temporary status page dated 10th June:
We have worked tirelessly through the night and over the last 48 hours to recover as many VPS as possible. However, we have now reached the end of all of our servers, and as such, if your server is not currently up, or not partly up (i.e. it is up but not working due to a configuration issue) then it is unfortunate that you will have lost your data due to this third party attack.
The event was widely reported:
- Webhost Hack Wipes Out Data for 100,000 Sites
- Webhost Denies Poor Passwords Led to Catastrophic Hack
- U.K. Web Hoster, Customers Scramble After Attack Deletes 100,000 Sites
Particularly sobering is the news that the CEO of LxLabs, implicated as the developers of the software that was hacked, has committed suicide:
- LxLabs boss found hanged after vuln[erability] wipes websites
- Web Hacking Incident Database (WHID) 2009-45: Outcome: Death
Even if you don't have a formal disaster recovery plan, at least make sure you have backups of all your site code, database and other data.
Posted on: 11 June 2009 at 09:46 hrs
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