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RCN admits defeat

From an employee at RCN.. seems like when it first happened

Quote:

Here are the facts:

The network was attacked on Saturday morning at 5:30AM. The attackers were able to break into the management servers, from there they were able to get to all the customer servers that we manage.

They ran malicious commands to overwrite the filesystems corrupting the servers to a point where they need to be reformatted.

Our backup system was never meant to restore so many servers at once, it was designed to help an individual customer recover a single server, or some files in case of accidental deletion, or other action.

We manage nearly 1,000 servers and each server currently takes nearly 4 hours to recover, in other words 4000 man hours. This is not to mention that the backups are compressed, some customers have more data than others, and even when everything is restored there is still configuration work that is required to get everything working, ultimately this means that its over 4000 hours to get this completed.

We are simply not capable of recovering this many servers in any reasonable period of time, it will take over 1 month to get this done, and by then the customers will lose their businesses as well.

The backup system uses a custom format to compress and store the files so it is not easy to provide direct access to the data. In other words in order for anyone to get their files we need to go through a lengthly, and complicated restore procedure.

We wish nothing more than for this to be business as usual, but we are simply incapable of dealing with the circumstances.

Additionally the servers for our customers are on lease, these leases are owned by banks and from our projections the business would not be able to generate enough revenue to continue. That means that even if we brought up customers onto our network, in some time we would still go out of business due to loss of revenue and piling liabilities.

We have been working around the clock as we were not prepared for an event of this magnitude, the action that was carried out is malicious and criminal and we do not have a way to properly come back from this.

We are doing our best to work with each customer and get their servers back online, but we are simply overwhelmed. Some of our servers were hosted in ISPrime's facility, our other main facility is in North Bergen, NJ just a couple of miles away from ISPrime - and we are giving customers another option. We are not holding data hostage, and allow customers to move to any host that they choose. Please understand that we have nearly 200 customers and 1000 servers, and can only do single digit number of restores at a time, making it impossible to get to everyone's request at once.

Please bare with us as we look to restore your information and find a new home for your business.

We would also like to say that we do not concretely know who the attacker was, or what their intentions were, but we have opened a case with the FBI to investigate this matter and find out who is responsible for this malicious and criminal attack.

This doesn't match up with what they're currently saying at http://realitychecknetwork.com/, but much less can those 4000+ work hours be lessened? That's over 4 months of downtime for some sites :Oh crap Looks like the end for them

welcome to yesterday

all this was already posted by RCN owner

it's amazing how fragile online businesses are, one malicious hacker and it can destroy the entire business :(

im so glad i host my stuff on my 300 baud modem

Ouch, if You need any help or anything I can do just hollar.

wow. I wonder how many hosting companies are vulnerable to this kind of attack. I guess I should look into getting some offsite backups done.

Lets hope also that the hacker made mistakes and can be traced

Quote:

Originally Posted by woj (Post 17626356)

it's amazing how fragile online businesses are, one malicious hacker and it can destroy the entire business :(

Quote:

Originally Posted by PornHustler (Post 17627201)

Back up..back up

:2 cents:

And don't rely on your host for backups... do your own.

that gives you another lesson: backup your stuff locally! Don't trust hosting companies "BACKUPS", because they are worth shit when you need to get your data restored fast or if you wanna switch to replacement server fast

Quote:

Originally Posted by nickutis (Post 17627285)

If you are doing local backups make sure you figure in the speed of your home ISP's upload. Also make sure you are getting a reasonably high per thread speed with your host. Some throttle single threads to 50K - 100K and that will be very slow. If you have hundreds of gigs it might take you WEEKS to upload all that data to a new host. :upsidedow It might be a good idea to have backup space remotely but with a separate company who has a very fast connection.

This is a lesson. Don't host your money making sites with a host that hosts piracy.

What a shame. I really wish RCN and its customers the best!

Bottom line you should have backups of your own. At the very least you are doing on a quarterly basis. PERIOD.

Quote:

Originally Posted by bDok (Post 17627487)

Bottom line you should have backups of your own. At the very least you are doing on a quarterly basis. PERIOD.

Good point - as you never know - I send my hosting company a few external drives to do a master backup a few times at year. All contracts have a natural exclusion to all acts that are unexplainable.

Quote:

Originally Posted by chronig (Post 17627200)

serious thread but sorry i loled wtf

Wow. 200 customers and 1000 machines!

Hope the good people come out of this ok.

I have almost all 500 blogs backed up locally on my workstation. and copied over to an external. next time I go down to my storage unit I'll leave a 3rd copy over there.

+1 on the local backups.

The only real back up is a back up on a different server with a different hosting company, so you can easily switch over within minutes if needed, with just changing your dns.

Quote:

RCN admits defeat

The conclusion: DO NOT HOST ILLEGAL SHIT (TUBES)

:2 cents:

OK learned something new here today
Store your backup locally.

This can be done from off the WHM panel right?

Is RCN out of business now? They don't respond to e-mails/ICQ/whatever.

fucking coke that is huge

This is why I recently bought an external and saved every last video and picture that I have shot....Before that, I had all of my stuff on my server and I was paying the host for a backup...But I was up to like 100 a month to back my shit up and that didn't prevent somebody from doing what happened to RCN....If that shit happened two months ago, I would be FINISHED.

Now I can sleep well knowing that my life's work is backed up.

It's really annoying :( get good reliable and webmaster should have their own backup

It's so fucked up that I had to come to GFY to find out what happened to RCN. I have been hosting with them for over 5 fucking years, an email would have been nice.

Arrrrgh.

Quote:

Originally Posted by V_RocKs (Post 17627342)

This is a lesson. Don't host your money making sites with a host that hosts piracy.

I'd like to believe it was that simple of a reason, but come on like they are the only host around here with those type of sites? I'd find that really, really hard to believe.

In fact some other company owners have even posted here they host tube sites and can only do their best on the content theft, but still take their business.

I just don't think it has to do with that. This sounds like some malicoius business shit.

My sites are down, and they're not even porn! So some asshole upset at rcn hosting pirate sites and wants to seek revenge is going to take down thousands of other clean sites too? That doesn't make any sense.

I doubt ANY of us will ever know the real reason. I don't think they want people to know...

hope you will find that fucker,

best of luck guys

I really wonder who they pissed off enough to have this type of hack done to them. It literally brought down their entire business, mission complete.