Had an interesting (and hopefully not one to be repeated experience) this 
morning.  Got an email from my web host to say that my VPS account had been 
disabled because there was a phishing site on it.  That meant 22 sites were 
switched offline.

Some toe rag had battled his way through the back door with a brute-force 
attack via SSH, set up a domain name and uploaded the dodgy page to the root 
of the server, so it appeared when you typed in the IP address of the VPS 
server.  Thankfully, I was able to get the offending account off the server, 
reactivate the whole account and all the sites were back online in a few 
hours.  The tech support team at the web hosting company was excellent - 
helpful, constructive and very willing, so kudos to them.

Separately, I emailed the abuse team at chummy's domain registrar (assuming 
he used his real details or his own account) as well as the security team at 
the affected US bank.  Had an interesting conversation with their head of 
security, who is very interested in looking at the details of what 
happened - from what I read he wants chummy's balls on a plate.

Looking back on what happened, I think I made two mistakes - firstly, I 
didn't implement the IP blocker on the firewall that controls who has SSH 
access, and secondly I didn't run the regular backups that are built into 
the Plesk interface.

"Trent SC" <invalid@.invalid.invalid> wrote in message 
news:4vmdnRIGfop5ZufXnZ2dnUVZ8gOdnZ2d@brightview.co.uk...
> <snip>
> hours.  The tech support team at the web hosting company was excellent - 
> helpful, constructive and very willing, so kudos to them.

Who's your host then? They've done a good job.

--
+mrcakey
www.twitter.com/mrcakey

>> hours.  The tech support team at the web hosting company was excellent - 
>> helpful, constructive and very willing, so kudos to them.
>
> Who's your host then? They've done a good job.
>
> --
> +mrcakey
> www.twitter.com/mrcakey
>
>
WebFusion.  had a VPS account with them for a few years, and bought another 
one from them earlier this year.  And yes, they did a very good job: 
strictly speaking, VPS customers are on their own in terms of getting tech 
support, but their guys went out of their way to sort out the problem.