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We had a major incident last night on our web hosting server. Nearly all of our websites on this server were effected.
One of our clients did not secure their website and this allowed hackers to gain access. This is very difficult to monitor as we cannot easily find these "holes" on our servers.
This also effected our recent backups and we were unable to restore from a recent backup – this is why the server has been unaailable most of the day.
We were able to get a backup from
mid may 2011 and restore this – this will have effected any sites that have had changes to their source code or databases since this time.
If you have a more recent database backup and source code then please load these onto your websites so that you can bring them back up to date.
If we can help in any way then please contact us.
I understand that this will cause problems for you or your clients and we apologise for this.
We will make changes to our backup strategy to prevent this from happening again as we take daily and weekly backups.
I would also encourage you to take a backups of your database and source code from time to time and to copy them to a place off of our server. This can then act as a emergency copy as well.
If you are using open source software then make sure that it has the latest security patches – hackers look for these sites and break into them.
regards
David Richardson
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