Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Web Hosting : AltusHost.com Servers Hacked?!

[Omar Hachem]

Hi.

I am extremely frustrated at the moment. I leave my sites for a day and I come back to them and find that they are completely down. Then I notice that the owners of Altus Host posted a notice on their website stating that they have been hacked and that they do not have backups to ALL of the accounts they are hosting. Without those backups, I basically am losing 4 websites (www.ffmages.com and www.trancefanatic.com, to name a few) because I don't have any backups on my computer and I trusted this company enough to think that something like this would never happen. In all my years in the website business I have never had an experience like this.

But this isn't what upsets me the most. I tried accessing their client area and it doesn't even work! Then I waited 10+ hours just to get a hold of someone in the technical staff through their live chat and then when I asked to see what was going on and if I could get backups, the guy tells me that I should email support or make a ticket. So I tried emailing support@altushost.com as I was advised to and then I get an automatic email reply telling me that the email failed to be delivered. And on top of that, the technical staff member I was speaking to wouldn't respond to me after I had said that the client area was not working and therefore could not post a support ticket.

They state that 90% of the websites they are hosting on their servers have backups and are recovered. And they're going to tell me that I'm ironically a part of that 10%? And if you take a look at their Facebook page, so many of their customers (like me) have been asking questions with no answers. This is unprofessional and I am so disappointed and unimpressed with the service at this point. I am paying $33/mth for nothing! All I want is backups of my 4 sites so that I can take my business elsewhere and be done with this nightmare.

They promise that they will offer their customers 2 months of free hosting, but what about the people who potentially have no access to backups? How will they be able to make up for that? I didn't even get an answer and I want to know what's going on with my sites.

Does anyone here have any recommendations or advice for me? I'm infuriated and don't know what to do.

[gordonrp]

Originally Posted by Omar Hachem

Does anyone here have any recommendations or advice for me? I'm infuriated and don't know what to do.

Keep your own backups in future. Your data is your responsibility. Consider natural disasters, hosts going bankrupt, legal issues, etc, there are millions of reasons as to why you should always have your own backups in a different location.

Originally Posted by altushosts.com

webhosting from $1.24/Mo

[socialbookmarker]

Hello

I lost one site myself. I actually registrated myself here to start a thread of this outage but I couldn't start a thread because I am so new.
Of course I am also very angry and frustrated right now. Their technical staff at the chat were very unhelpful and arrogant.

But ... After reading their TOS I dont feel sorry for myself any longer :

Backups
AltusHost's hosting accounts include a nightly backup service, however these backups are for AltusHost's administrative purposes only, and are in NO WAY GUARANTEED! Customers are responsible for maintaining their own backups on their own personal computers. AltusHost does not provide any sort of compensation for lost or incomplete data in the event that backups do not function properly (even if the malfunction was due to negligence on AltusHost's part). We will do our best to ensure complete and accurate backups, but assume no responsibility for this duty. Always back your site up to your personal computer! We make no guarantees about the availability of backups.

[kpmedia]

Originally Posted by Omar Hachem

Does anyone here have any recommendations or advice for me? I'm infuriated and don't know what to do.

Use a better host next time. That's all we can really suggest at this point.

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[MikeDVB]

If you run a search, you'll see that this sort of thing isn't really all that rare. Most who keep backups religiously have learned the hard way by losing important data to them. Even individuals I've told numerous times in the past to keep extra copies of their own haven't done so.

I guess the only way to learn is the hard way, sorry for your luck.

[SceneSRV]

Well, unfortunatelly, AltusHost is known for loosing all data(RAID failes on one of VPS nodes) and random VPS reformats out of the blue(kpmedia confirmed it). It wouldn't surprise me if one of their outsourced Indian staff did a mass reformat by a mistake.

[NodeGurus]

This was posted over from another forum:
http://www.wjunction.com/10-hosting-...altushost.html

Dear clients,

Due security leak in WHMCS our management panel which is powered by WHMCS has been hacked today around 5PM (CET).
After hackers entered to our management panel they started removing accounts located on our VPS master node as well as some shared hosting servers.
Since we noticed issue after 10 minutes, we've localized attack, powered off all compromised servers.
We have backups of most compromised servers, but unfortunately, for some of them we do not have. We was just in middle of setting up r1backup server for all our shared hosting servers and VPS nodes.

Because of this, in next 24-48 hours our management panel will be off because of security reasons. Since we need deeply to investigate this attack. We are in business since 2008 and this is 1st time such big attack happened on us. This was well organized by someone who doesn't like us so much.

Since many of you were down for 5+ hours, and some of you still are, we will offer 2 months free to all clients who were down today.
We do understand how mad you are on us now, we are mad as well. Such thing isn't good neither for your or our business.

But we assure you that all will be back in function ASAP and we will give our best to make you, our client, happy!

This today were an hard, but good lesson for our company.
Within next 48h We will switch from WHMCS to UberSmith which is much more secured Data Center Management portal (ubersmith.com) and leading DC Management portal today.

Our servers are very secure, however this time, our management panel failed due security issue in WHMCS. Anyway, we don't try to make any excuses, it's our fault and we are ready to take full responsibility because of that.

Most of accounts are restored from our local backups now and 90% of VPS & Shared Hosting servers should work now without issues.
If your website is still down, please email us on support@altushost.com so we can work on your matter.

Your sincerely,
Julian F.
Senior Technical Engineer
AltusHost Inc.

[kpmedia]

Yeah, there was another thread at WHT, with the above memo, comments from several WHT members (including myself, where I described my past issues with their incompetence), but that post is now MIA. Not sure what happened there. It must've gone down hill or something.

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[Kurikami]

The part that I still don't get, how did they get hacked if they used up to date WHMCS?

[kpmedia]

Originally Posted by Kurikami

The part that I still don't get, how did they get hacked if they used up to date WHMCS?

The WHMCS license checker doesn't show AltusHost as having a valid license.
So possibly hacked because they didn't have access to proper updates?

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[SceneSRV]

@kpmedia Maybe one of your friends hacked it???

</sarcasm>

[ChrisFL]

If a nulled license was the case, it would go to show that some companies are willing to cut corners at the expense of your data (and quite personally financial info!)

A legitimate license is not that expensive!

[Kakashi]

Originally Posted by ChrisFL

If a nulled license was the case, it would go to show that some companies are willing to cut corners at the expense of your data (and quite personally financial info!)

A legitimate license is not that expensive!

Shocking Really... $16 per month was all they needed to spend -_-

[BassHost]

Originally Posted by ChrisFL

If a nulled license was the case, it would go to show that some companies are willing to cut corners at the expense of your data (and quite personally financial info!)

A legitimate license is not that expensive!

I don't think it is a nulled license. WHMCS users are getting attacked a lot lately.

[NateN34]

Wow, this a joke. "Security breach because the software is insecure"...yeah right.

This host is dumber than a bag of rocks to pirate WHCMS. I bet they will use a pirated UberSmith too. Best you can do is avoid a host like this, because they are obviously trash if they have to pirate $12.50/m software. That means they don't care about their clients and have no clue what they are doing.

Don't surprise me though, I mean seriously $1.24 a month? For that price no one should be complaining or even using them for that matter. Stuff like this is cheap for a reason.

Common sense folks, use it!