BACK TO HOME - BESTWEBHOSTING2008.COM - GO TO BESTWEBHOSTING2009.COM

WEB SITE HOSTING SERVICE IMPROVEMENTS LAST TWO YEARS.

Over the last several years there have been some substantial gains made in the areas of protecting web servers across the world. For years web hosting companies have been the target and the victim of a number of scams and cyber attacks from cyber malcontents from all over the world.

Most web hosting clients who have been around for a while, let’s say five to seven years probably have experienced some form of scam or attack on their web hosting company’s service, mostly ddos attacks. Ddos attacks are denial of service attacks which can occur to a web hosting server in two ways. The server’s bandwidth pipes can come under attack when a network of servers start to flood a server, usually a single client on that server with requests to open their web pages. This can be a random attack or in some cases it can be a singular attack against a particular web site (I recall several times while working for web hosting companies that a hate site –or what some would consider a hate site if it different with certain beliefs etc- would come under a ddos attack. In this case all of the web sites on that server would timeout for anyone trying to reach them during the attack.

Another method of ddos attacks are when a network of servers start to bombard a web site within a shared environment with a flood of emails which clogs up the email server processor and sometimes the server processor working on other functions and the results would be that the clients on that server would not be able to send and receive email and possibly their sites would time out when someone tried to reach them.

Other types of cyber attacks include hacking, either the server itself or a clients’ site on that server. When a server is hacked it is a big problem and most companies restrict the shell access of  a server because that allows clients to upload scripts which can then make the server vulnerable to hacking. When a clients web site is individually hacked it is usually due to a breach on that client’s individual username and password in the event that the user let someone have that information or if they made the username and password too easy to crack. There have been some high profile cases of hacking into a server or set of servers this year including the headline grabbing notices of several large countries web servers and government servers being hacked including the US Pentagon’s servers.

Virus attacks are something that can also affect a server but usually viruses only get into the server environment if the web host allows shell access to the server and most web hosts do not allow this form of permission.

One of the last but most frequent ways of cyber attacks against web hosting companies is the incidence of fraud where someone will get a hold of someone’s credit card information and try to purchase a web site hosting account fraudulently from a web host, usually the fraudster has the credit card holder’s billing and contact information to authenticate the credit card transaction and the only way of verifying accurately that this is fraud is to call the web hosting customer and manually confirm that they have placed the order.

Overall however the last few years and in 2008 in particular it seemed that the rate of incidence of attacks against web hosts and their clients are way down. Most of this is due to the fact that web hosting companies have implemented a number of security protocols to outsmart or out maneuver the cyber bullies. Greater firewall protection, stricter customer guidelines in terms of security access, automatic dialing of the customer phone number used to confirm accounts while they are taking place and blocking the IP addresses of the origins of the attacks as well as blocking some access of persons from countries where cyber attacks are known to have occurred.

Let’s hope that technology, being proactive and a little luck can help us stem off more cyber attacks in the future.

Charlie White
 
BACK TO HOME - BESTWEBHOSTING2008.COM - GO TO BESTWEBHOSTING2009.COM