The hacker defaced customer homepages
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Web hosting provider InMotion (www.inmotionhosting.com) was hacked on Sunday morning, according to several reports on Monday.
In an email to customers, InMotion said the homepage defacement attack was launched by Bangledeshi hacker TiGER-M@TE at around 4 am EST and replaced index files in all public html directories with the attacker’s own branded index.php, according to a report by Blast Magazine.
“We understand the method the attacker used to accomplished this and the main exploit path was through an internal management server that can control Cpanel on other servers. The management server was used to change passwords on the Cpanel servers then login with those passwords,” Todd Robinson, president of InMotion said in a statement.
According to the report, InMotion doesn’t believe any data was stolen or any passwords were compromised in the attack that hit more than 500,000 websites.
“It does not appear that gaining passwords was a goal or was accomplished, just password changes were used. Access to the management server was gained from an exploited customer’s server that was within our network,” Robinson added. “Though our team moved quickly to disable the internal management server and limit the exposure of the servers to this attack when it began, it was a very serious breach and could have been much worse if the hacker had intended to do more harm.”
Most of InMotion’s customers’ websites were repaired by around 11 pm on Sunday, according to a report by the Inquirer.
In a Tweet, InMotion says its security team traced the vulnerability to an authentication system and it was working on a patch.
TiGER-M@TE hacked Google Bangladesh in January 2011, and also claims to have hacked the local domain of Yahoo, Microsoft, Bing and Nokia, among others.
About Nicole Henderson
Nicole Henderson writes full-time for the Web Host Industry Review where she covers daily news and features online, as well as in print. She has a bachelor of journalism from Ryerson University in Toronto, and has been writing for the WHIR since September 2010. You can find her on Twitter @NicoleHenderson.
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