Recently, there has been a surge in ransomware attacks as we know it, and web hosting service providers are the new eye candy of cybercriminals. Now, the leading web hosting service provider for ASP.net called SmarterASP.NET, is the latest victim of a major ransomware attack.
The company has already released a statement confirming the news of the attack and explained that on Saturday hackers managed to compromise its network after which all the websites owned by its 440,000 customers went offline. Moreover, the company’s IT security team is working on decrypting the data and implementing stricter security solutions to prevent such attacks.
“Your hosting account was under attack and hackers have encrypted all your data. We are now working with security experts to try to decrypt your data and also to make sure this would never happen again.”
The company also noted that as soon as its database servers are restored, a majority of the websites will be back online.
“Once that’s recovered, most of your sites will be up and running already. You will also be able to make DB back up right away on our control panel. We are optimistic that everything will be back to normal no longer than 12-24 hours. We will not go home until everyone is taken care of.”
It must be noted that the SmarterASP.NET’s website was also affected by the attack and it remained offline throughout the day but was back online on Sunday.
SmarterASP.NET is popular around the world and the firm claims to be operating the world’s top three world-class data centers and offers reliable and flexible support to “mission-critical internet operations.”
However, it is not yet clear if the company paid the ransom to the hackers or is using backup for restoring the servers. This attack has occurred only a week after the Florida-based remote IT management and collaboration solutions provider ConnectWise released a warning to notify its customers that its software is currently used by hackers for installing ransomware.
In 2017, the South Korean web hosting company, NAYANA was hit with Erebus ransomware attack and ended up paying a whopping $1.2 million in Bitcoin. In July this year, the cloud hosting provider iNSYNQ was hit by MegaCortex ransomware that disrupted its entire operation.
Therefore, if you use the Internet as a common user or run an online business especially hosting company; it is time to educate yourself and your employees about the growing threat of ransomware. You can follow this guide to understand how ransomware works, how it targets unsuspected users and what can be done to prevent it from damaging your business.
