Fasthosts shutdown "threatens businesses"

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 6 Dec 2007 at 16:03

Website owners are reportedly facing going out of business as a result of the Fasthosts' security flaw that has left websites paralysed.

Fasthosts reported last week that it was the victim of a hacker attack.

It subsequently asked its customers to change their login details, and when hackers used the information to compromise some FTP sites the company enforced an automatic password reset, locking some customers out of their websites, but also shutting down websites which displayed a specific database vulnerability.

However, a report in The Times suggests some websites still haven't come back online and quotes Chris White, a small business owner who claims his downloads dropped to zero from 47,000, leading some subscribers to believe he had gone bust.

"The loss of readership on my site is incredibly significant to my business," he tells The Times. "I've lost thousands of pounds and there are literally thousands more out there like me. I've got a pile of letters and e-mails from long-standing customers saying they're sorry we've gone bust. This has been a crime turned into a farce and I don't know if we'll survive."

The hack also affected PC Pro Forum member didgeman, who reported: "Oh, this is nice... I've just realised that none of the 75,000 PHP product pages on our Fasthosts hosted site are accessible. In fact, it goes as far as to display some of the PHP connection information that I really wouldn't want displayed. Nice one Fasthosts... no doubt the site will be dropped from Google also as it tries to crawl and gets error pages... great."

Fasthosts refuses to discuss how many websites continue to be affected by this problem. In a statement, it claims: "Fasthosts would like to apologise once again for the inconvenience to its customers affected by the recent password changes. Unfortunately, the measures were necessary to fully ensure our customers' websites and data were secure.

"The password change was applied to a significant portion of the Fasthosts customer base who hadn't changed their passwords following our initial announcement about a network breach in October.

"It was applied following a very small number of customers who did not change their passwords having experienced a compromise to their FTP or website space."