hostcow.co.za hacked!!

R

ruyav

Active Member
Joined
Feb 11, 2012
Messages
38
Reaction score
0
Can anyone offer advice.

I have designed websites for clients and hosted them with hostcow.co.za . Now it appears hostcow have been hacked on the 19/02/2012 according to this Today my client emails me saying everything in his web mailbox is gone. I check it an hour later and some data appeared to be restored. Now i looked at it again and it appears they have rolled back to 19/02/2012 . There is obviously emails missing (like mail from today!!) . Also when i go to webmail.mydomain.co.za . The "you got hacked" still appears. Their phone has been engaged or off the hook all day and no response via email.

what can i do??
 
Stop freaking out and wait. That's your only solution.
 
ruyav said:
Can anyone offer advice.

I have designed websites for clients and hosted them with hostcow.co.za . Now it appears hostcow have been hacked on the 19/02/2012 according to this Today my client emails me saying everything in his web mailbox is gone. I check it an hour later and some data appeared to be restored. Now i looked at it again and it appears they have rolled back to 19/02/2012 . There is obviously emails missing (like mail from today!!) . Also when i go to webmail.mydomain.co.za . The "you got hacked" still appears. Their phone has been engaged or off the hook all day and no response via email.

what can i do??
Click to expand...

I heard that the owner wanted to sell Host Cow already in December and too be honest I think they have been slacking off

They claimed to host about 5000 sites which I dont think is true but anyways

On the other side


Why would you host with them ? This makes you look very unprofessional

For local

Afrihost
Hetzner

For international

Host Gator
 
Everyone gets hacked these days. My website was hacked, godaddy found malware added onto my website.

Don't hosting companies back up user data everyday??
 
Stop freaking out and wait. That's your only solution.
Click to expand...
Im trying! lol

Why would you host with them ? This makes you look very unprofessional
Click to expand...
It makes me look terrible!! I really go out of my way to get clients and please them. shamefully, the reason i chose them at the time was they were cheap. I obviously know alot better now! At that point I was new to this.

Don't hosting companies back up user data everyday??
Click to expand...

I would hope so. I dont understand how the matter could not be sorted out after 3 days.
 
Most of the so called "hacks" are generally just bot scripts looking through websites for a list of vulnerabilities and then exploiting them.

They generally try upload a shell script like c99.php which gives them full access to the databases (if passwords are weak) and access to the files.

Best way to prevent 90% of attacks is just to make sure the basic things like if you have a file upload feature on your website checks the file CORRECTLY and not just upload any file. There are many easy ways to get into websites but no guy is going to sit on each website and "hack it" manually unless he has a certain goal.

Even my web server was "hacked" because I was testing a file upload script which some guy by using the null byte character tricked php into thinking a jpg file uploaded was actually a php script.

Best way if you have sensitive data is to check what ports are open (nmap) if mysql has the open port where the root username can be brute forced.
 
this has happened to ever ISP and really not worth getting so excited about

Check out Zone H if you feel you feel the need to.

http://www.zone-h.org/

Not sure if their mail is in any way linked to their site being hacked, sounds more like coincidence.

In any case, wish them well as Im sure they have a tone of work set out for themselves.
 
ngadao08 said:
Get another reliable web hosting company in the future, get like Mweb or Godaddy
Click to expand...

Mweb is ok but stay far away from Go Daddy

Some good hosting companies here on my bb just ask and they will sort you
 
BTW....I think hostcow is back online.

Any suggestion on where I can get cheap co.za domains? A company who actually register the domain under the name of the person who is paying for it?
 
Looks like someone has removed all their images....

I don't host without a decent backup service, I made a small error over December while I had 5 people uploading to my site and if it wasn't for the stupid amount of backups afrihost made I would have lost an insane amount of man hours. I think at the end they were able to roll back to an hour before the mistake, which is epic to know....

It may be primitive but having your own backups also helps, especially with ecommerce sites like mine. I download copies daily which I upload to my cloud storage and to a different VPS. It's a pain but helps me sleep better at night:D
 
Ipwn 4 said:
Looks like someone has removed all their images....

I don't host without a decent backup service, I made a small error over December while I had 5 people uploading to my site and if it wasn't for the stupid amount of backups afrihost made I would have lost an insane amount of man hours. I think at the end they were able to roll back to an hour before the mistake, which is epic to know....

It may be primitive but having your own backups also helps, especially with ecommerce sites like mine. I download copies daily which I upload to my cloud storage and to a different VPS. It's a pain but helps me sleep better at night:D
Click to expand...

Will be recommending Afrihost from now on, having a hosting provider do that many backups is exceptional in my books.
 
NomNom said:
Will be recommending Afrihost from now on, having a hosting provider do that many backups is exceptional in my books.
Click to expand...

Hetzner also does an insane amount of database and file backups, it comes real handy when you have overwritten a file by accident...
 
Afrihost/hetzner are top from what I've heard, don't think I've ever seen a big complaint about either.
 
Ipwn 4 said:
Afrihost/hetzner are top from what I've heard, don't think I've ever seen a big complaint about either.
Click to expand...

Got one client on Afrihost, pretty happy.
Most of our clients use Hetzner and never had any issues.
 
Am very happy with Hetzner and Afrihost. Not had problems that where not easily and reasonably resolved.
 
NomNom said:
Will be recommending Afrihost from now on, having a hosting provider do that many backups is exceptional in my books.
Click to expand...

Yeah, but stay away from their shared hosting. I've been having endless hassles with them this year across multiple user accounts and websites. One several occasions this year our sites have gone down, or they messed up their IIS settings, resulting in our site pointing to the default site on the box, and our customers ending up at another website completely.

Their staff seem to be very lax on the shared server side of things. Stick with their virtual or dedicated servers if you want to avoid 90% of their stuff ups.
 
shogun said:
Yeah, but stay away from their shared hosting. I've been having endless hassles with them this year across multiple user accounts and websites. One several occasions this year our sites have gone down, or they messed up their IIS settings, resulting in our site pointing to the default site on the box, and our customers ending up at another website completely.

Their staff seem to be very lax on the shared server side of things. Stick with their virtual or dedicated servers if you want to avoid 90% of their stuff ups.
Click to expand...
Sounds like they had a failure on one of the shared hosting servers and had to restore - thats the only explanation I can come up with that sites go down and IIS settings being lost.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X