site was down here's why

#108210 - 01/26/04 11:08 AM site was down here's why
Anonymous Unregistered	From our host Quote: Good morning Vertexhost customer, As you may have heard, late sunday evening one of our servers was compromised. This was also the server that housed our domain nameservers, so even our other servers were affected last night as well, just not to as great of an extent. This security breach should never have happened, as we are constantly updating the server software and hardware to ensure these types of issues do not occur, and in over 14 months this has been the only record of such an instance on our network. The result of this attack rendered the server zen unavailable for a good portion of sunday afternoon and evening. This also rendered our company website and support desk unavilable due to the DNS issues, which is why there has been such a lack of communication regarding this matter up until this point. We apologize for leaving people in the dark for longer than necessary. Because of this attack, a lot of data on the server was destroyed. We utilize a two stage process of backing up data. First, there are nightly backups, weekly backups, and monthly backups done on the server itself, and those files are stored on a dedicated backup drive. These backups can be downloaded at any time from your control panel. Besides these backups, we also back up data to an external drive. These backups are less frequent do to the tremendous cost and time associated with them. These backups occur twice a month. Unfortunately, the attacker corrupted most of the backup files located on the dedicated backup drive. This means daily and weekly backups were most likely lost for most accounts. This means we have to use the off-site backups to restore the data. The problem with this is that with users who run dynamic sites such as message boards may have lost data posted between that backup date and the present time. This also affects users who may have uploaded content to their site during this time. This is a very unfortunate situation, and even our company lost a good deal of data and some customer information in this attack. We sympathize with you and your website's needs. This is just a very important reminder to us all how important it is to back up your site and important information and keep it in a safe place very often. Here at Vertexhost we do our best to maintain backup data for emergency situations such as these. But as always, no guarantees can be made when it comes to data, and it is ultimately the responsibility of each client to maintain local copies of their files as well as archives of their data. We will do our best to work with everyone to ensure your site is back up and running as quickly as possible. You may still notice some small server issues as we continue to work on bringing things up to speed, but for the most part things are back online. One of the big problems right now is when users FTP into their accounts, no files are being displayed. Don't freak out, the files are there but they are not showing up in FTP. We will attempt to contact you again with any new developments. Thank you for your patience and understanding with this issue.
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