23rd May 2012 - Status Update

[Matt]

Status Update - 23rd May 2012

 

We are continuing to work very hard to recover from the events of the past few days.

 

To start with, here's a recap of the timeline of events:

 

Monday 21st

> Alarm raised about breach of primary server

> Access regained to server, security audit performed, and website restored from backup

> Independant company also asked to perform security audit of primary server

> DDOS Attack starts

 

Tuesday 22nd

> DDOS attack to main server continues throughout the day causing intermittent access issues

 

Wednesday 23rd

> DDOS attack to main server continues

> DDOS Attack starts towards forum

> Forums are attacked - posts edited. vBulletin used as a point of entry. The forums, the documentation, and the blog are all hosted on a different server, entirely separate from our primary server. So this poses no new risk to our main client database. This issue is ongoing.

 

Unfortunately credit card details were taken, and we do urge any clients who feel their credit card might have been included in this to take appropriate steps to secure their card. Further investigations have shown that the social engineering attack did not involve the compromising of any email account. This was only done after access to the server had been gained.

 

We've been working very hard with our web hosting provider to restore and secure services. The DDOS mitigation continues to be ongoing and we are doing everything we can to limit the impact of this.

 

Our main priority until now has been getting our main site back online, secured, and operational, so that we could bring our WHMCS installation back online to open up a route of communication to you, our users, and start dealing with any questions and concerns as quickly as possible.

 

As soon as we have things completely back under control, we will be reviewing all our systems and operating procedures, and making changes as and where appropriate. Steps are already in progress to migrate to a new hosting infrastructure as a first priority. This will likely mean some brief downtime in the coming hours.

 

As I'm sure you can imagine, we are currently receiving a very large number of support tickets and enquiries, and we're doing all we can to answer them as quickly as possible. Your continued patience & support in these testing times is greatly appreciated.

 

The whole WHMCS team has been working extremely hard, and I'd like to take this opportunity to thank them as well for all their efforts in the past 36 hours.

Edited May 25, 2012 by Matt