Fasthosts Shared Hosting Customers Face Downtime as DDoS Attack, Windows 2003 Vulnerability Shake Platform

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This article originally appeared at The WHIR

A denial of service attack caused customers of Fasthosts shared hosting services to experience intermittent website downtime on Monday. According to a report by The Register, the downtime was a result of a loss of DNS performance due to the DDoS attack.

The Register said that the outages impacted customers for around five hours on Monday morning.

According to an emailed statement from Fasthosts obtained by The Register, the company also identified a separate issue, a vulnerability to part of its Windows 2003 shared web server platform.

“The small affected proportion of our large hosting platform was immediately isolated, and work is being undertaken to investigate and fix the issue as swiftly as possible,” Fasthosts said in the email.

As a “precautionary measure” Fasthosts took some shared hosting servers offline on this platform.

On its help page, Fasthosts said that when a new vulnerability is found in the Windows 2003 shared hosting platform it usually takes one of three steps: applies an update in its next maintenance window, immediately mitigates the vulnerability and applies a permanent update in the next maintenance window or immediately updates the vulnerability.

An update this morning said that the vulnerability “has been fully understood” and its servers are in the process of coming back online after being updated. “So far progress is going well and 50 percent of the platform is back online,” Fasthosts said.

On its Facebook page, Fasthosts said it expects the issue to be resolved fully “later this evening.”

Fasthosts provided customer updates via its Facebook page as well as its system status page on its website, and apologized to customers about the downtime on Twitter.

In terms of compensation, Fasthosts told one affected customer on Twitter that compensation can be discussed “once the issue has been resolved so [Fasthosts] have timescales.”

At the beginning of the year, customers of Fasthosts were offline for up to seven hours after a utility power outage triggered connectivity problems.

This article originally appeared at: http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/fasthosts-shared-hosting-customers-face-downtime-ddos-attack-windows-2003-vulnerability-shake-platform